[lug] Getting frustrated with gnuplot

[Daniel Webb]

On Wed, Oct 11, 2006 at 10:39:21PM -0600, Todd Ruskell wrote:

> Can't say I've played a lot with it, but you could try plotting all the 
> contours with the same line type, and then use the label command to label a 
> few of the contours so the reader can figure out the slope and size of the 
> contour steps.

I am considering doing that.  It's a pain though, because there are 8 of these
plots and I have already changed the data several times.  I may label them as
you suggest when I am sure they're not going to change, but it will be a pain
to manually set all those labels if the data shifts.
 
> Certainly not a perfect solution, but depending on your application, it might 
> not be too bad.  On the other hand, I agree that the sample contour plots 
> from R do at least look pretty.

I can't evaluate if R can do either of the things I asked about (contours with
levels or 3D bar).  For example here is one that can do the contours:

http://www.mps.mpg.de/dislin/exa_cont.html

It's not free as in speech, but then, neither is gnuplot and I've been using
that.
 
> You didn't necessarily specify "free" software, so I suppose I should mention 
> Matlab and Mathematica, if you happen to have access to them.  

I don't have either of those on my computers or I would probably just use
Matlab.  Plus, once I leave school they're #@#$! expensive considering what
little I would use them for personally.