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Helix
Asked: 2010-08-02 11:18:44 +0800 CST

What scientific plotting software is available?

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I am currently doing some experimental work and I have a lot of data to trawl though. I use Gnumeric, and it's very good, but often I feel there has to be something better.

Ideally I would like the maximum number of features with a minimal learning curve, but really I'd just like to know if there is something better than Gnumeric that I can use for manipulating and plotting data.

What would you recommend?

software-recommendation

15 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I am a Physics student and found that the best scientific plotting software for Ubuntu is QtiPlot. It is very similar to Origin, and works really well.

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  2. Numpy and Matplotlib make a good combination for processing and displaying data.

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  3. I would suggest Gnuplot. It has a nifty set of features and is good documented. So if you take some minutes to skim through the documentation you'll get the basic idea. I use gnuplot for nearly all my plots, only when I don't need the full set of features I tend to use TikZ from LaTeX.

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  4. The R language is also quite popular and can be combined with Sweave for use with Latex.

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  5. Ggplot2

    Is one of the best data visualization programs available. It implements the ideas of Edward Tufte, author of classics in graphical design and scientific communication as 'Beautiful Evidence' and 'The Visual Display of Quantitative Information'.

    The Deducer GUI makes it possible to use ggplot2 without requiring knowledge of the R programming language in which ggplot2 is implemented. If you can use excel, you can use Deducer. Your statistical analyses will be valid and your graphs (thanks to ggplot2) will be effective and pretty.

    #dependencies
sudo apt-get install r-core
sudo apt-get install rJava default-jdk
sudo R CMD javareconf
sudo R
#to install deducer
install.packages('JGR')
install.packages('Deducer')
library(JGR)
JGR()
#in JGR
library(Deducer)
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  6. Sage might be good for that. It ties together a lot of open source math tools to create a very extensive and flexible app.

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  7. I've used qtoctave. It is similar to MATLAB if you've used that before.

    You can install it from the repositories: sudo apt-get install qtoctave

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  8. gnuplot and xmgr/grace are probably the oldest Unix scientific graphing programs. I still use gnuplot from time to time (BTW it is not GNU and some consider it not free), because I know it and I've been using it for many years, but it hasn't changed much in this century and it's not user-friendly according to today's standards.

    I think that the most promising programs now are QtiPlot, LabPlot and Veusz. The first two are similar to Origin (the most popular plotting software on Windows). QtiPlot has a full-time developer and it seems to be developed more actively. Veusz is different than Origin clones and unlike other programs it is written in Python. It's not in the distro yet, but it has PPA.

    Another program that I use for plotting data is fityk. It is specialized in curve fitting and I use it for plotting mostly because I know it well (I wrote it), but I guess in most of cases QtiPlot or Veusz will be the best choice.

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  9. I used SciDavis, Scilab and MatplotLib. However lately I am using ParaView, but this is not an easy to use program. The previous ones are easy.

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  10. I would suggest DataScene. It produces really cool graphs and chart animations. I found the learning curve is fairy flat because of the Wizard and tutorials. You may find more information on DataScene at:

    http://www.cyber-wit.com

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