PGPLOT

PGPLOT is a device-independent graphics subroutine library written starting in 1983 by Tim Pearson, a professor at Caltech. PGPLOT is written mostly in FORTRAN with a modular output API that allows output to several dozen types of plotting device. PGPLOT has been widely used in the academic and scientific communities,because it provides both low-level (glyph, point, line, and area) plotting primitives and also high-level facilities for drawing graphs. The most recent versions (5.2.2 as of spring 2005) are free software in the sense that they may be redistributed to third parties and modified.

PGPLOT includes device-independent output to many devices including several types of image file, graphics display terminals and plotters, PostScript devices, and X Window. Interactive devices can be used to deliver numeric parameters to the controlling program via a graphics cursor. It is known to run on many operating systems, including most Unix-like systems, Mac OS, and Microsoft Windows.

In part because of its age, PGPLOT has several limitations compared to newer packages such as PLplot. In particular, PGPLOT supports only 8-bit indexed color graphics, and not full RGB color; and there is no clean way to render graphics directly to an array in program memory.

External links

* [http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~tjp/pgplot/ PGPLOT home page at Caltech]