

Ask HN: What's a good open-source plotting tool? - sendos

I love Matlab's plotting functionality, and its open-source clone (Octave) has horrible plotting capabilities.<p>Any other tools out there? How good is something like SciPy for this sort of thing?
======
dmlorenzetti
I use R (www.r-project.org/) and am generally happy with its plots. The
graphing commands have a few quirks, and a lot of non-orthogonal inputs, but
it lets you dig in and do things at a pretty low level, in case you want to
fine-tune your graphs.

One thing I remember fondly from Matlab days, that R isn't so good at, was the
ability to grab a handle to a graph axis, and rescale the axis, without
starting a new plot. R pretty much forces you to know, from the start, what
limits each axis should have.

A colleague uses SciPy and is similarly very happy. However, I can't speak
about it from personal experience.

I've used gnuplot (www.gnuplot.info/) for small tasks (one or two lines on an
x-y plot). My general impression is I would find it too constricting for
bigger jobs. In particular, R allows me to do a full-fledged analysis and then
plot results, while gnuplot pretty much requires you to generate the results
externally.

------
bugsbunnyak
matplotlib (python) is quite good:
<http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/gallery.html>

another python tool to consider is chaco:
<http://code.enthought.com/projects/chaco/gallery.php>

matplotlib is ideal for matlab-style iterative plotting. chaco is considerably
faster (at least ~1 year ago) as it is specifically designed for creating
interactive plots.

if you need 3d graphics, consider the mlab library used in mayavi and some
other projects. the commands are matlab-like, and it produces very nice
graphics using vtk:
<http://github.enthought.com/mayavi/mayavi/auto/examples.html>

------
huragok
Try out jQplot (<http://www.jqplot.com/>)

