9.2 Plotting

[PLOT[,col1,col2,$\dots$][,options]

Construct input for a plotting program using the table as data. PLOT is a subcommand of TABLE and must follow TABLE or any of its valid subcommands given in the previous section. More than one PLOT command can be included within a single TABLE, and each invocation generates a new plot. However, PLOT must appear after all other TABLE subcommands.

col1, col2,$\dots$ are the names of the table columns to be plotted. These must be an exact subset of those given on the TABLE command. The first column is taken as abscissa, and the values of the remainder will be plotted against it. If no columns are specified, then the entire table is plotted; if a single column is specified, it will be used as abscissa, and all other columns in the table will be plotted as ordinate. options can be chosen from the following.

CMD=unix_plot_command

unix_plot_command consists of the system command needed to start the plotting program, followed by any required options. The whole thing should normally be enclosed in quotation marks to preserve lower-case letters. The default is 'xmgrace'. At present, only the xmgrace, grace, gracebat program, with only numerical data, are supported.

FILE=plotfile

By default the input file for the plotting program is saved in input.table$n$.plot$m$.agr, where $m$ is an automatically generated sequence number. The name of the plotfile can be modified using the FILE option.

INTERACTIVE

By default, the plot is not shown on the screen but all plot data are saved in the given file. The plotting program can be started interactively by giving the INTERACTIVE option.

TYPE=type

If TYPE is specified, type should be set to one of pdf, svg, png, jpeg or eps. The result is that the gracebat program is executed on the plot input file to generate the graph output file in the desired format. This feature depends on the availability of gracebat, and on it supporting the requested output format (for example, at present pdf is supported only under Mac OS X).

NOSPLINE

Prevents spline interpolation of data points

NSPLINE,number

Number of interpolation points (default 20)

The following additional directives can be given before the PLOT directive:

COLOUR,icolour1, icolour2,...

Colour map to be used for columns 1,2,...; zero means to use default values (colours black, blue, red, green cycle)

SYMBOL,isymb1, isymb2,...

Symbol types to be used for columns 1,2,...; -1 means no symbols; zero means to use default values.