

Ask HN: What is the best program to produce graphs? - tomrod

Howdy HN!<p>I&#x27;m curious what you as a community use to produce clean vector graphic graphs.<p>I&#x27;m an academic and have used Matlab&#x2F;GnuPlot&#x2F;Matplotlib at different times. In addition, I&#x27;ve used LibreOffice Draw. All these have some good strengths but also a lot of drawback.<p>What have you found is useful for producing high quality graphs that have a lot of flexibility for labeling, highlighting, etc.?
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chewxy
If by graphs you mean charts, these are the tools I use:

\- d3js + nvd3 [0] - if the charts have to be online for consumption of people
outside the company. Not so much a fan of using this because I have to do
extra work to convert the data into json, and then write the scripts to
generate the chart.

\- ggplot2 [1] - if the charts are static and need to somewhat be shown
(internal analysis, internal reports, client-facing presentation, etc). Of
late, I've been using ggplot2 for xkcd-style charts and nobody seem to mind :P
- so I don't think people are actually looking closely into the charts

\- plot (from R) - if the chart is only for my consumption - I don't need a
fancy beautiful chart to read a PCA output for example.

As for high quality, the charts are only as high quality as the way you use
them. If you use the wrong charts for the wrong data, it's not going to be
high quality.

[0] - [http://nvd3.org/‎](http://nvd3.org/‎)

[1] - [http://ggplot2.org](http://ggplot2.org)

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t0
I'm very happy with Rgraph
([http://www.rgraph.net/examples/](http://www.rgraph.net/examples/)).

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runjake
Gnuplot, Matplotlib, Google Graphs, DOT format, RRD frontends, sparklines
libraries, Excel, etc.

It depends on what kind of data I'm dealing with.

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Irishsteve
GGplot2 with R

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Nurdok
Graphs like pie charts of like the data structure?

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tomrod
Sure. Though I'm usually looking at economic variables instead of
data/filesystems

