rlplot: high-quality scientific graphs made easy
January 7th, 2007 edited by lucasEntry submitted by Phil Bull. DPOTD needs your help, please contribute !
If you're looking for an easy way to create and edit professional-quality scientific graphs, why not take a look at RLPlot?
When you run RLPlot, you are shown a spreadsheet screen into which you can enter or copy data. RLPlot's spreadsheet is suprisingly fully-featured for a simple graph-plotting package, and many built-in formulae are available. Once you are happy with the way your data is arranged, simply press Graph -> Create Graph to produce your graph.
There are many different graph types for you to choose from (see screenshot), and RLPlot offers an impressive array of options for customising error bars, axes, labels and data-points. When you have finished, RLPlot shows an editable WYSIWYG view of your graph. In this view you can continue to customise your graph and add additional elements such as annotations, a legend, or even another data plot.
Once you've perfected your graph, it's time to output a copy of it. RLPlot offers a good choice of output options, including the SVG format (ideal if you want to do any further editing in another application). It can also print the finished graph directly.
While not as powerful as gnuplot, RLPlot offers a quick and simple alternative for creating good-looking graphs of scientific data. It appears to be actively maintained, and there are no major bugs currently known for the current version. RLPlot is available from Debian Stable (a more recent version is available in Testing) and Ubuntu (since Hoary).