GNU plotutils | Hacker News Reader

GNU plotutils

gnu.org

57 pointssmartmic14 comments

An interesting tool. It does the right thing by default in ways that gnuplot doesn't. You shove data into it on stdin(or as a file) and it gives you a decent looking graph.

The bitmap font rendering is unacceptably bad though, and it seems awkward to do anything more than a basic 2d plot.

The LZW patent expired more than 12 years ago, and I'm sure most people would rather be able to produce a fully-compressed animated GIF rather than an RLE-encoded one. I wonder if they are really holding on to their anti-LZW stance, or if it's just that no one has bothered to update the programs and the web page?

Ah the less well known sibling of gnuplot. It really is a nice system and a quick way to get graphs, but the poor bitmap support is spot on.

It's only been 7 years since the last update, too!

You say that like it's a bad thing. Finished software* is something we should all strive to develop and is the first thing I look to use when I need it.

*: i'm not sure if this software is finished or just dead ;)

In my experience no plotting software we have today is finished. The sheer infinite range of possiblities of putting data on paper makes it unlikely that this will be the case soon.

Sometimes software is done and but for bug fixes not in need of change. This provides stability for programs that take it as a dependency. Of course, as with any dependency each person might be well served by judging for themselves.

Here are the bug reports for GNU Plotutils over the past 10 years or so. It might not even require scrolling.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-plotutils/

I was trying to find out where this suddenly came from and how this related to gnuplot.

A few sentences from the submitter on why this is news and why we should care would be in order.

I discovered plotutils lately while learning BRL-CAD, a very old but powerful CAD system. There is a command to export views to UNIX plot files which I did not know up to now. An it seems powerful enough for quite a lot use cases.

The metafile format allows for very flexible, generic 2D drawings whereas gnuplot is specialized to 2D/3D diagrams. BRL-CAD extended it for 3D drawings: https://manned.org/libplot3/ff1ca6c1

I like several things about this discovery: * easy conversion to PNG, SVG * actually an alternative to SVG, using idraw * can directly translate from the PIC language without troff. The PIC mini language is a perfect fit (at least for me) to draw simple graphs, flow charts etc.

Yes, it is old, but sometimes I prefer mature proven UNIX tools to fancy new web based applications with questionable privacy statements.

And this is exactly right, popping out some PIC code is "easy", no need to figure out Cairo or Webkit or some third party graphics API, pipe it into plot and boom, picture.

Gnuplot is, despite its unfortunate name, not a GNU project program and not GPL licensed. The GNU plotutils are.

It's not just not GNU, it's got it's own license with non-standard conditions.

http://gnuplot.cvs.sourceforge.net/gnuplot/gnuplot/Copyright...

And it's pronounced new-plot not guh-nu-plot.

I suppose the submission seemed intellectually interesting. That's the criteria for Hacker News and something that differentiates it from many other aggregators.

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