Looking for a good 2D scientific publication quality plotting program? 

Tom Steiner (steiner@sfu.ca) announces the availability of his shareware 
plotting program Splot for OS/2 2.x. What follows is the introduction from
the Splot documentation explaining the general philosophy.

Introduction

Scientific plotting programs fall into two main categories. The first is
the non interactive type represented by most mainframe plotting programs
which require that the plot be specified as a file of plotting
instructions. This file is edited using a text editor and then the plot is
generated by executing this file. The second major type of plotting
programs are those popularized on PCs which allow a user to specify the
drawing using a mouse and are inherently interactive. This type of program
is inherently easier to use and it is possible to rapidly make changes.
The later type of program is however not ideal since the drawing is
usually stored in a proprietary non text format which is difficult to
interpret. This makes the task of reusing parts of a previous drawing in a
new drawing impossible. Furthermore, these programs invariably do not have
the flexibility to handle the needs of preparing scientific plots. Splot
has been developed with the goal of bridging these two disparate
approaches in an attempt to gain the benefits of both. 

Splot is geared towards generating two dimensional, publication quality
scientific plots as painlessly as possible without sacrificing flexibility
and power. Splot contains much of the functionality of Postscript and can
thus be used as a general purpose drawing tool. Furthermore it has
functions specifically aimed at producing plots of x,y data pairs. Splot
generates a drawing by interpreting a C program which specifies the
drawing. Unlike traditional mainframe plotting programs this happens
quickly since the interpreter and editor are integrated into splot.
Specifying the plot in a powerful programming language has several
advantages. First of all since C is currently the most popular programming
language in existence many people will already be familiar with its use.
This makes C a much better choice than developing a specialized language
to be interpreted. Having the drawing specified by a programming language
also gives algorithmic capabilities thus allowing repetitive components of
a drawing to be generated using a standard loop construct. Data to be
plotted can also be manipulated before drawing using the built in standard
C math library. C also allows parts of a drawing that are to be used more
than once to be specified as a subroutine. This sub component can then be
drawn anywhere in the final drawing by first specifying a translation,
scale and rotation and then calling the subroutine. Lastly, the
description of the drawing is in plain ASCII text allowing it to be easily
understood and transferred electronically. Splot contains a built in
drawing and plotting function library whose members are called by the C
interpreter to generate the drawing. 

Splot has been uploaded to ftp-os2.nmsu.edu. Look for the file splot104.zip
which contains the executable, documentation and examples. The executable
is a complete demo with only the hardcopy disabled. Splot is shareware and
a hardcopy enabled version is available for $50.

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