
What's new in gnuplot 5.2 - leephillips
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/723818/dbaaa9093072d800/
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kxyvr
What workflow does everyone else use for generating a large number of plots?

Personally, I've used both gnuplot and Veusz quite a bit. In gnuplot, my
workflow has been:

1\. Write a bunch of scripts in Python or MATLAB/Octave to separate the data
and output a large number of csv files

2\. Write a gnuplot script to read the csv files to generate the appropriate
plots

In Veusz, I combined step 1. and 2. into a single Veusz (.vsz) script.

At this point, I tend to default to gnuplot over Veusz because:

1\. Complicated data parsing seems to render the Veusz GUI obsolete. The GUI
seemed to be a nice learning tool, but it doesn't generate complicated loops
or conditionals for parsing through data well.

2\. Debugging Veusz scripts felt more difficult than it should be. At the end
of the day, they're just Python files, but I didn't have access to the Python
repl nor pdb. Perhaps there's a way to do, but I don't know how.

3\. gnuplot seemed to do a better job generating plots that integrated in
LaTeX documents. The epslatex terminal leaves the text to LaTeX, so we get
uniform fonts across both the document and the plots, which is nice.

That said, Veusz generated gorgeous plots and I've been moderately happy with
both. Mostly, I'm trying to figure out if anyone knows of either a better
workflow and/or plotting program to generate a large number of plots to be
included either as standalone images or part of a larger document in LaTeX.

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wodenokoto
What is the benefit to generate a CSV and then have a separate program build
the plot, compared to just using matplotlib/seaborne directly from python?

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leephillips
Say you scale your problem up and write a Fortran program to run it on a
supercomputer. You can then use that same plotting script, which is
independent of the language that created the data.

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kxyvr
That's basically it for me. Sometimes, I generate data from some very large
programs and it's more practical and scalable to process that data outside of
Python. In addition, most often, I put the plots inside of a LaTeX generated
report or slides. In gnuplot, I can generate a piece of LaTeX code that will
automatically match the fonts when the document changes. Does anyone know if
the same functionality can be found in matplotlib or do we have to change the
fonts by hand?

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cr0sh
The improvements sound interesting and useful, but it still seems like (I
haven't dug into it yet) they haven't done one that I would love to see:

True perspective for the 3D plots.

I understand the reason behind the axiometric/orthographic projection, but
sometimes I would like to see something a bit more "natural". I know I'm not
the only one.

IIRC, it's a single OpenGL flag setting; I don't understand why this setting
isn't allowed to be changed...

/again, maybe they have fixed this...my apologies in such case

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leephillips
Have you tried sending a feature request to the developers? This sometimes
actually leads to new features!

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mynewtb
Experimental automatic binning for histograms is something I will surely use.
Thanks for sharing this article!

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throwaway7645
I've always wondered why that isn't more common in things like Excel. It's not
hard to write your own bin function (I don't think at least), but I seldom
have the time when I'm building simple little charts.

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mindcrime
Sounds like a lot of really useful improvements. Can't wait to get my hands on
the new version!

