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Apple Businesses Science

Plotting/Graphing Programs for Mac OS X 98

Posted by pudge from the he-has-a-degree-in-science dept.
brarrr writes "I'm starting out in graduate school at the UW in Materials Science and Engineering and doing research on spin electronics. Results from this work have me searching for a Mac OS X plotting/graphing program for 2D data and there are many of them, but no useful comparison anywhere. What do you use? What do you recommend? Why? My uses will include plotting, presentation, curve fit, trendline analysis, and more. I've looked briefly at: pro Fit, gnuplot (difficult to use, not very professional output), Abscissa (site is down, cannot evaluate), SmileLab (not very robust), Tecplot, IGOR (so far the best looking, but expensive), and KaleidaGraph (difficult to use, feels poorly ported). So what works/doesn't work? And don't bother saying Excel...."
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Plotting/Graphing Programs for Mac OS X More

Plotting/Graphing Programs for Mac OS X

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  • What I use (Score:5, Informative)

    by Merlin42 ( 148225 ) on Monday March 03, 2003 @12:51PM (#5424750)
    Personally I do most of my plotting(and much of my computing) with MATLAB. One of my collegues uses IDL for everything, and he tends to get more profesional/pretty looking output. I have heard spectacular things about tecplot, but I have never used it myself.

    • Re:What I use (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hariya ( 88607 ) on Monday March 03, 2003 @01:17PM (#5424925)
      Tecplot is good. I use it a lot but it needs an X11 installation on OS X. Also, it is expensive. It is good for contours, vectors and 3D plots. If your needs are not that intense, I would recommend either Matlab or Mathematica, the student versions cost less than $200.

    • Re:What I use (Score:4, Informative)

      by davecl ( 233127 ) on Monday March 03, 2003 @02:20PM (#5425389)
      I'm a dedicated IDL user. Its much more than just a plotting package, and can be used for all sorts of analysis and other numerical work. It isn't cheap, though RSI do a lot of campus site lisences so you be able to get it through the university. It does need to have X11 installed, but it works fine with either Apple's version or X-Darwin. The numerical part of IDL makes excellent use of the G4's vector processor if you have one.

  • Have you tried grace? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 03, 2003 @12:52PM (#5424758)
    You can find it here http://fink.sourceforge.net/pdb/package.php/grace [sourceforge.net]. It's available via fink [sourceforge.net]

    --JJ

    • Re:Have you tried grace? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Grace, and it's former parent XMGR are ABSOLUTELY AWESOME for 2D plotting. They don't do stupid things like "read in all your datasets and try to keep them in memory". Spend some time making nice templates for your work, and then you can blast the plots out. I routinely plot datasets of 20-30MB with xmgr (and xmgrace) on Solaris and it works great.

      I have never tried the OSX version, but I'm sure it'll be just as good.

      Gnuplot is nice, and does 3D plotting too, but like the poster says, it doesn't make publication quality plots.

      • Re:Have you tried grace? (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        grace on OS-X is just superb for 2D plotting. Works just like the original X-windows version. Fink install is painless. I use it every day.
      • You can output tex source with gnuplot. This allows you to make very professional looking plots embedded in a tex document. By default gnuplot outputs ass looking plots, but try plotting to more than an X11 window before you knock it.

  • IBM Data Explorer (Score:5, Informative)

    by Executive Override ( 605018 ) <spam@skewed.de> on Monday March 03, 2003 @01:01PM (#5424821) Homepage
    Check it out: www.opendx.org [opendx.org]

    Excellent (and surprisingly easy) for complex 3D stuff but a bit over the top for simple 2D plots.

    It's Free Software, but I don't know if it works for MacOS though.

  • METAPOST (Score:5, Informative)

    by IainHere ( 536270 ) on Monday March 03, 2003 @01:02PM (#5424832)
    You don't state exactly what you're going to do with the graphs, but I assume at some stage they're for inclusion in reports.

    If so, use METAPOST [bell-labs.com].

    On that page is a specific section on formatting graphs with METAPOST. It is a bit more complicated than throwing them out of MATLAB (which is what I'd choose for looking at the results day to day), but I guarantee that it will look more "professional", and well just plain better than any other method. And it is free. It also has the advantage of being based on Donald Knuth's work with METAFONT (itself work for TeX, which is essential for all maths/scientific publications) and it is what he uses for TAOCP. That should be enough.
    • Oops. Just re-read TFQ, and noticed that "My uses will include plotting, presentation, curve fit, trendline analysis, and more"

      Well, regardless of what you use for initial viewing/analysis of results, use METAPOST for presentation.
    • METAFONT may have been nice in its day, but it's garbage now. Embedding bitmapped fonts into your postscript documents means that they can't be easily translated into other formats, i.e. PDF. Use pdflatex for your documents and stay the hell away from junk like METAPOST.

  • Prizm (Score:5, Informative)

    by inblosam ( 581789 ) on Monday March 03, 2003 @01:04PM (#5424851) Homepage
    From graphpad.com [graphpad.com] Prism is very decent for doing a lot of 2D plots. It has a lot of analysis tools. It works great for my posters.
    • I second this...graphpad prism is a great program!
    • I agree that Prism is the best combination of nice GUI, some decent linear and nonlinear analysis tools, and good ease of use. Its biggest liability is the fairly small number of graph types supported.

      I've tried most of the other ones listed here. The X-windows based programs are fine, I particularly like R, but Christ almighty it's irritating getting them working. And besides, I want to use a *native* Mac (Aqua) application.

      The two best programs I know from the Windows world are SigmaPlot and Origin--the former irritating and quirky, but both have good analytic capabilities, and a huge number of 2- and 3-D graph types. I've contacted both companies, requesting Mac versions, and encourage anyone else interested to do so:

      http://www.spssscience.com/corpinfo/index.cfm
      h ttp://originlab.com/www/company/contact.asp

      B

  • Gnuplot (Score:4, Informative)

    by chriso11 ( 254041 ) on Monday March 03, 2003 @01:05PM (#5424861) Journal
    Gnuplot is very versatile. I have used it for years in a professional environment. Actually, the main thing I use it for is importing graphs into Framemaker - I use the Gnuplot MIF file format output. I wrote some simple c programs and scripts that allow me to convert lots of files at once, and then just import them. Excellent quality vector formatted graphics that can be scaled and easily worked with. I've also used them in presentations - save the Framemaker file as a PDF, and Adobe has a full screen option. No Powerpoint for me!

    • Re:Gnuplot (Score:4, Informative)

      by Soong ( 7225 ) on Monday March 03, 2003 @02:07PM (#5425283) Homepage Journal
      I use gnuplot on MacOS X, but it didn't Just Work when I download-and-compiled it. I had to hack a couple pieces of code to disable it's broken NeXTStep drawing routines that it tries to use with MacOS X.

      Once I got it working gnuplot has done everything I need. PNG output for web, eps output for embedding, ps output for ps2pdf. Don't bother with gnuplot's 'pdf' output mode. It depends on a very suckful PDF generation library (that stamps all your output with big "demo mode" watermark crap).

      My dad uses IGOR and is very happy with it. Of course, his employer bought it for him.

      • A MacOSX version exists (Score:4, Informative)

        by MyNameIsFred ( 543994 ) on Monday March 03, 2003 @05:02PM (#5426671)
        Some people prefer the command line version, but for those who want a carbonized app, a MacOSX version of gnuplot exists at gnuplot for Macintosh [mac.com].
        • I'm a physics student at UC Santa Cruz and I've been using the carbonized version of gnuplot for about a month now, and it's really well done. What's cool about it:

          1st gnuplot looks good using OSX fonts, much better looking then i ever got out of a windows/linux box.

          2nd you still use it from a console windows so all the commands are the same, as is the interface.

          3rd You can save the graphs in the following image formats: PICT, MacPaint, PhotoShop, JPEG, PNG, SGI, Quicktime Image, TIFF, BMP

          4th You can save graphs as quicktime movies, and show how a graph evolves over time.

          5th you can still run it from the terminal using pgnuplot

          Physicsnerd

        • The carbonised version of gnuplot does work well. However, it is based on 3.7.1 which is getting on a bit now. 3.8 (the pre 4.0 version) has some very nice extra features including mouse interaction for zooming and 3d plot rotation. And some very nice surface mapping and image handling functions.
          I have had no problems building version 3.8 under OSX 10.2.4. The aqua term works fine but you only get the mouse interaction when running under X11 which also works perfectly well in my experience.

          On a related point you can use gnuplot from within octave [octave.org] a matlab-like environment which is open source. This also works fine under OSX 10.2.4 and can make use of the VecLib BLAS and Lapack accelerate libraries under OSX - details on HPC for OSX [psu.edu]. However, I must admit my preference is with R [r-project.org] for data analysis outside of my own code (several others have already mentioned R) purely because of the wealth of statistical functionaility available.

  • Jgraph (Score:2, Informative)

    by pjcreath ( 513472 )
    I know at least one PhD who uses Jgraph [utk.edu] (no, not that JGraph [jgraph.com]) for all her publications. I don't think it does a lot of analysis for you, though.

  • R? (Score:4, Informative)

    by ByronEllis ( 22531 ) on Monday March 03, 2003 @01:24PM (#5424962) Journal
    I use the R statistical package my self. Depending on the version you get it has either a Carbon or X11 interface (an Aqua interface is being built) and provides a number of different output formats including JPG, PNG, PS, PDF and (using an external package RSVGDevice) SVG.

    http://www.r-project.org (has the official Carbon build, an X11 super package with something like 300 external packages is also occasionally built, check the R-SIG-Mac mailinglist for information about that)

    • Re:R? (Score:2, Informative)

      by pimephalis ( 60034 )
      I would have to second this suggestion. If the original poster isn't going to be doing complicated statistical analysis or curve-fitting (I mean, is he just ramming a straight line through his data cloud, or is he into splines and whatnot), then it probably isn't worth his time to learn the syntax. If, on the other hand, he's going to be doing some real stats, then he should definitely investigate R as a solution.

      R is multi-platform, capable of producing graphs in a number of formats (eps, ps, pdf, png etc), can be run in batch mode (great for simulations) and can produce very pretty graphics. There is no gui, so all fine tuning of the figures has to be done through the command line. However, it can handle immense data sets, supports mathematical text (meaning you can throw a complicated equation into your graph and have it come out with publication-quailty finish) and can do some colour, three-dimensional plotting. A wonderful piece of software that has been indispensible during my Ph. D. research.
      • Hopefully the GUI thing will improve over time--there's a project called ObveRsive (or something like that) thats gotten started within the last few months to put, from what I can tell, Stata/DataDesk types of things over R...There's been a great deal of interest in that from time to time.

        There's also at least one person working on more interactive forms of documents (read: widgets and data in your paper controlling live graphing surfaces) which could be used to build GUIs as well. You can find info about some of this cutting edge stuff over at http://omegahat.org and I think http://obversive.sf.net

        Until those arrive there's also Sweave (its in the tools package that ships), which while not really a GUI lets you combine LaTeX and R noweb style to generate some quite nice ps/pdf output (it deals with making sure the appropriate PDF or EPS files are around and whatnot).

        Or RWeb which lets you build CGI based interfaces to R (complete with graphs), though performance isn't exactly stellar (R has a pretty heavy launch penalty relative to most computational tasks)

  • Aabel (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    A new, but quite powerful and reasonably priced alternative is Aabel from Gigawiz software (http://www.gigawiz.com). Lots of different graph options and an interesting way of interacting with your data.

  • Ploticus (Score:3)

    by RandomCoil ( 88441 ) on Monday March 03, 2003 @01:28PM (#5424987)
    You should give Ploticus a try. It has no GUI, but the output can be very good (postscript) and it is very flexible. The price (free) is also very nice.

    I've used it to create plots/graphs for journal publication and I've used it to create graphs on-demand for a website.

    Main page: here [sourceforge.net]
    Good examples: here [sourceforge.net]

  • IGOR (Score:5, Informative)

    by squarefish ( 561836 ) on Monday March 03, 2003 @01:32PM (#5425021)
    IGOR (so far the best looking, but expensive)

    standard: $550
    education: $395
    student: $85

    Although it suggests the student rate is for personal use only, I think I would try to find me a student.

    • Re:IGOR (Score:3, Informative)

      by WatertonMan ( 550706 )
      Igor really is an amazing program. Further it was written *for* the Mac. (There was a Windows port - but I believe it is primarily a Mac program) I'd heartedly recommend it. (Although I've not used the last version)
    • I see the academic pricing [wavemetrics.com], but I find no mention of an $85 student price. Do you have a link?

    • I love Igor (Score:5, Informative)

      by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Monday March 03, 2003 @04:25PM (#5426326)
      I love igor and have used it for 12 years now. It's matrix format is clumsy compared to R or Matlab. but for line plotting and data analysis I really like it. its script language is VERY fast (around half as fast as C) compared to say Matlab. The best part is that it is both GUI and command line so you have the best of both worlds. and its easy to come back to after you set it aside for a while (use the gui till you remember the commands). the on-line help is quite helpful too.

      The next best thing is the ability to save and restore your entire state (plots, command history, variable and array contents, scripts, notes,... well everything) in a compact single file that is crossplatform with windows and macs. finally it is very mac like in the way it works. I find this very nice. Other sci programs are good but dont act mac-like.

      but my most favorite aspect is that this software is written by physicists and statistical quantum optics people. When you tell them what your are doing they sometimes actually get interested in it and will write you a special piece of code to do it.

      the worst part of IGOR is that it is now so old, there are lots of options on every command rather than a consistent interface. So its becomeing a little less mac-like with time. this actually is fine for unix minded folks but confusing for many mac people. I hate reading man pages I like things that are intuitive.

  • Mathematica (Score:4, Informative)

    by adamnap ( 156974 ) <ajn23NO@SPAMcornell.edu> on Monday March 03, 2003 @01:35PM (#5425034)
    Is the best looking IMHO. I use octave and matlab daily, and I love them, but Mathematica has them beat on pure aesthetic appeal.
    The problem is often the the graph itself. Lots of pretty graphs and plots are more confusing than informative. Look into one of those clever books by Tufte. "The visual display of quantiative information" or something like that; they are good coffee table books as well.

  • The obvious answer (Score:4, Funny)

    by papasui ( 567265 ) on Monday March 03, 2003 @01:35PM (#5425040) Homepage
    is to do a screen capture of a Texas Instruments calculator in graph mode, you don't get any more professional than that! (Yes I'm just joking)
  • Personally I use pro Fit or R, depending on the circumstances.

    pro Fit is very nice and gives professional looking output, it is inexpensive (though not free), and is fairly easy to use for most tasks. It will also do curve fitting and other nice things through an easy-to-use graphical interface.

    R is a statistical package which works fairly well for most plotting needs, though I have found it to be a little more obnoxious to use than pro Fit and much much more difficult to configure to get it to plot things the way you want (at least until you get familiar with the commands--it is a command line package). OTOH, it will do statistical analysis and such niceties as principle component analysis on your data.

  • Igor (Score:3, Informative)

    by the eric conspiracy ( 20178 ) on Monday March 03, 2003 @01:50PM (#5425138)

    Igor can be annoying at times, but the fact of the matter is that it doesn't run out of gas when you need something sophisticated.

    Since you are a student I'd recommend taking the student license which from what I remember is fairly reasonable.

  • Kaleidagraph (Score:3, Informative)

    by Enrique1218 ( 603187 ) on Monday March 03, 2003 @01:53PM (#5425166) Journal
    My colleagues and I use Kaleidagraph. It does the job we need it to do. We use for everything from making graphs for our presentations to fitting data to automating with LabView. It doesn't take alot of time to learn either which is good because we mentor a lot of undergrads with no experience and we rather spend our time using it than learning it.

    PS: I think the recent port was decent. It doesn't crash and everything is in the same place as the older version.

  • Mathpad (Score:2)

    by inio ( 26835 )
    I've been using MathPad [unh.edu] for quite a while now. It's labeling capabilities are somewhat limited but it's free and it has a nice symbolic calculator.
  • I agree that gnuplot's output isn't as fancy looking as some other plotting programs, but what's difficult to use about it?
  • I am still using CA-CricketGraph III which is probably the best all-around graphing program ever made. The problem is that its been several years since it's been supported. It runs just fine in the classic environment of OS X so there is no real pressure to switch. I'm not the only one, a lot of people at my university are still using CricketGraph.

    Eventually, I do plan to get someting else. GraphPad Prism, as mentioned elsewhere in this topic, is probably the most likely replacement. I have also tried Kaleidagraph and ProFit and they're not bad.

    I would like to use someting like Gnuplot which I know is open and will be around forever but It just isn't easy to use yet. I think the secret there would be to develop some spreadsheet macros to output data in Gnuplot's ASCII based file format but I have not had time to research this possibility and try it out.

  • Mathematica + Illustrator (Score:3, Interesting)

    by derPlau ( 184699 ) <andyp@holyroodMOSCOW.ed.ac.uk minus city> on Monday March 03, 2003 @02:31PM (#5425462)
    I don't think any graphics package produces truly publication-quality figures. What I do is make the figures in Mathematica, and bring them up to publication quality in Adobe Illustrator. Okay, it's not the cheapest solution, but Mathematica allows precise control over every quantitative aspect of the figure, which is missing from all but the most user-unfriendly command-line packages out there. If you use Mathematica already, this is your best option.

  • Try R - open source S+ (Score:3, Informative)

    by jameshowison ( 162886 ) on Monday March 03, 2003 @02:54PM (#5425629) Homepage
    You might want to check out R - the open source version of S. I'm just exploring it at the moment and it seems to have fairly sophisticated capabilities.

    The syntax is somewhat tricky to learn but if you are a coder you shouldn't have much difficulty.

    There's an aqua and an X11 version (through fink):
    http://www.r-project.org

    There is a pdf on doing graphic and plots available through their "Contributed" part of the website.

  • ANY that implement Tufte's suggestions? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dpbsmith ( 263124 ) on Monday March 03, 2003 @03:31PM (#5425870) Homepage
    In "The Visual Presentation of Quantitative Information," Edward Tufte makes a large number of specific suggestions for ways to make graphs more informative by increasing the proportion of "data ink."

    Conceptually, he suggests trying to erase every bit of ink that doesn't represent data.

    More concretely, his book is replete with suggestions that produce graphs that are beautiful, easy to comprehend--and slightly unconventional.

    For example, he proposes doing away with standard evenly graduated axes. Basically he suggests that each point on the graph should have an individual tick on the axis labelled with its exact value--and skip the round-numbered ticks (10, 20, 30). Of course this doesn't work if there are too many data points, but it is astonishing how many real-world graphs do NOT have too many.

    Has anyone seen software on any platform that aims to implement Tufte's approach?

    (Excel and friends have gone in exactly the opposite direction, of course. Tufte is vitriolic in his distaste for idiocy such as taking a single data point and illustrating it as a three-dimensional solid bar.)

  • Graph-O-Matic is shareware (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I am a grad student in chemistry and I recently bought Mathematica 4.2 for students. It is only $139.95 and very very powerful. The help browser is very unstable. I make sure I have everything saved before opening the help browser, cause there's a good chance that everything is gonna get waxed.

    I use Mathematica every day now, but when I want a quick 2D plot, and want it to look good, I use Graph-O-Matic. It is inexpensive shareware, but it is still pretty flexible. I like that I don't have to remember any syntax for getting the axes to scale, etc. Almost everything is point and click with the mouse.

    Another great thing about graph-o-matic is that it uses Quartz rendering and the plot are all anti-aliased. They look great. And you can grab the plot with the cursor and drag around to change views. Graph-O-Matic is very simple and very limited, but it is also very cool. Check it out!
  • Does any one know what applications do textbook companies use to make simple algebraic graphs? I've been trying to help an teacher develop his own curriculum for his algebra class, but drawing the graphs individually have become extremely troublesome.

    I had an idea that textbook companies might be using Adobe Illustrator or a similar vector illustration application, but it seems like the process would be excessively labor intensive. Thank you for any help!

  • Minitab through wine.

  • Symptom of a wider open source problem (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Monday March 03, 2003 @07:12PM (#5428023) Journal
    The open source world has very, very few comparative reviews. So you can end up trying and learning tens of packages in a field to find the right one for you. There *really* needs to be more complete compative online reviews, where four or more packages are compared against each other.

  • Others... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The best have been mentioned. A couple not mentioned include:

    • GMT (Generic Mapping Tools) [hawaii.edu] Which is a command line driven set of plotting tools that excell in plotting data on a map. There are some GUI's based upon this. The best I have seen for mapping.
    • M Map (for Matlab) [ocgy.ubc.ca] Also does mapping plots, but from Matlab.
    • Guppi (gnome based) [gnome.org]
    • SciGraphica [sourceforge.net]
    • Peakster [opennumerics.org] Simple real time plotting.
    • RTP [pdx.edu] Also very simple real time plotter.
    • Biggles [sourceforge.net] Python based plotter.
    • GRI [sourceforge.net] Python based plotter.
    • GRE [ocean.dal.ca] Perl based plotter.

    I don't know if some of these are MacOS compatible or not. They are Unix compatible though.

  • Another recommendation of IGOR. I'm a Mat Sci student at well (or was recently at MIT) and used IGOR extensively in developing my thesis. The graphing capabilities are really lovely, and the program is very powerful. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread there is a very inexpensive student version.
  • Very solid program that is cross-platform, and done by a company that's been on the Mac for years and likes the Mac. Other cross-platform alternatives are done by companies that are PC-centric and port to the Mac. (Usually either late or non-Macish ports.)

    Igor is more expensive than (just) graphing programs, since it is a full-blown scientific analysis program with scripting and real-time data acquisition capabilities. So it lets you manipulate and analyze data, then gives you nice graphs that are highly customizable.

    A big plus you won't see on any comparison chart is the email list. Totally professional and helpful with the highest signal-to-noise ratio of any list I've seen.
  • I used to have fairly good luck getting managers to approve purchases of graphic packages. But ever since Excel came out, the answer has always been "Why do you need that? Excel does graphs."

    Worse yet, I usually CAN get Excel to produce the graphs I need--after hours of struggling, trickery, hand-creating special data series, fussing with the fact that the charts are made of rubber and aren't any particular size--no problem unless you want a set of charts that are consistent with each other--can't get decent graduations on a logarithmic axis, etc. etc. etc.

    Anyone have any tips on how to QUICKLY convince a manager that you have a credible, specific need that Excel can't handle?
    • Anyone have any tips on how to QUICKLY convince a manager that you have a credible, specific need that Excel can't handle?

      Tell him you're plotting those special numbers that Excel calls "########"

  • I've used many of these programs and the choice depends on your goals, more or less in order of increasing complexity and expense:

    mathpad: interactive exploratory calculations and simple 2d/3d plotting; unique nonprocedural programming language.

    Kaleidagraph, pro Fit, IGOR: add flexible user-defined fitting procedures for interpretation of data plots. Some procedural scripting or programming capability.

    IDL or MATLAB: add highly capable numerical calculations, data analysis and plotting for batch processing of large volumes of data in a uniform way.

    One question I'm considering: does something like OpenDX provide open source competition for the likes of MATLAB or IDL?
  • So, who's interested in a Cocoa graphing package with some analysis features? My company has considered doing it for a while, and we could use some feedback. It'd be relatively cheap (targeted mainly at students), and place a lot of emphasis on making graphs that are actually presentable (unlike the ugly garbage that comes out of Microsoft Office applications).

    Drop me a line on what you think- you can figure out how to deobfuscate the address /. lists. Feature requests, ideas, acceptable pricing range...anything.
  • "I'm starting out in graduate school at the UW in Materials Science and Engineering and doing research on spin electronics....

    You'll find that most of the oxide electronics crowd (spintronics, ferroelectrics, etc.; the folks you'll be running with) uses Kaleidagraph. It's NOT the best port, I agree, but you DO have control over EVERYTHING once you get a feel for the software. You can also set up templates for commonly-used plots (like the theta-2 theta plots I'll bet you'll be doing a lot of). And, since it's what everybody else uses, you'll be able to exchange plots easily with collaborators for those last-minute additions to conference talks!

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