libraries for plotting

[John J. Lee]

On Fri, 4 May 2001, Helmut Michels wrote:

> Walter Moreira wrote:
>
> > Hello, Python people.
> >
> > I was browsing the Plotting resources section on Python.Org and there are some
> > broken links (pgplot, plplot, ppgplot). What package do you suggest me for
> > plotting? It looks that there are many but some are small or not manteined any
> > more. I found Biggles on Parnassys but didn't try it yet.
> > DISLIN looks good, but it is not free :-(
> >
>
> DISLIN is not free for commercial compilers, but it's free for Python.

Note that there are two Python interfaces to DISLIN: the one supplied by
(I think) Helmut himself, which follows the original C (or is it FORTRAN,
I don't remember) interface quite closely, and pxDislin, which is a Python
wrapper around Helmut's Python interface.

Other libraries: Gnuplot.  That's the only one I know of that is working
at the moment.  Anyone know of any others?

GUI graph plotting widgets: BLT for Tkinter, PyQwt -- note the 'w' -- (for
PyQt).

Gnuplot is good for quick plotting, and does produce quite nice output.
On windows it's a bit buggy.  The Python interface is good.  DISLIN mostly
seems to produce good output (but I couldn't figure out how to get
hidden-line surface plots that look right).  The original DISLIN Python
interface is a bit low-level, and the documentation for pxDislin is a bit
sketchy.

For simple plots of mathematical functions, there is biggles, but I've
never used it.


John