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Plplotter widget

PLplot is relatively small, portable, freely distributable, and is rich enough to satisfy most users. It has a wide range of plot types including line (linear, log), contour, 3D, fill, and almost 1000 characters (including Greek and mathematical) in its extended font set. The package is designed to make it easy to quickly get graphical output; only a handful of function calls is typically required. For more advanced use, virtually all aspects of plotting are configurable.

The PLplot package is distributable under the terms of the GNU Library General Public License (LGPL) with some exceptions -- see the file "Copyright" for full information. The intent here is to ensure that PLplot continues to evolve in a positive way, while remaining freely distributable. Placing the library under the LGPL enables software developers to use the PLplot library as an integral part of their product, even a commercial product.

Here are some examples of what Plplot can do:

The following few lines of Tcl created the following graph:

.p.plwin cmd plcol 15
.p.plwin cmd plenv 0 10 0 10 1 1
.p.plwin cmd pllab "x" "y" "Test plot"

set numberOfShades 10
set min -1.0
set max 1.0
set xmin 0
set xmax 10
set ymin 0
set ymax 10
for {set i 0} {$i < $numberOfShades } {incr i} {
	set sh_min [expr $min + ($max-$min)*$i/$numberOfShades]
	set sh_max [expr $min + ($max-$min)*($i+1)/$numberOfShades]
	set sh_col [expr $i/$numberOfShades.]
	if { $sh_min == $sh_max } { incr sh_max }
	.p.plwin cmd plshade d $xmin $xmax $ymin $ymax $sh_min $sh_max 1 $sh_col
}

and another:

NEWS (DEC 2002): You can get a binary version for WinTk of this package from here (this includes some examples, and is known to work with Tcl/Tk 8.4.x) and a starkit containing a set of 19 nice demonstrations of Plplot here . Most of my changes have finally been integrated into the core plplot distribution (you can use plplot/sys/win-tk/makefile.vc from the cvs distribution to compile and install the build here). The actual source code is basically all there, but there is no makefile/project for Mac OS or Unix yet.

You need Tcl/Tk 8.1.x to run with Plplot. The core code includes support for postscript output, but printing to a printer (rather than a file) is not supported on MacOS yet.

Download Plplot-Tk distribution. You may also wish to go to www.neosoft.com which has a reasonably recent version.

If you're interested in C++ Tcl interaction, have a look at the EvoX and CppTcl page.

Mail me:vince@santafe.edu, or go back to top, or return to the main menu.