ploticus: user comments and feedback

## User comments and feedback | Welcome Gallery Handbook |
| Manual page for User_comments_and_feedback(PL)

This page has been largely superceded by the ploticus news group. Anyone can read or post to this group without having to join it. Selected compliments will continue to appear on this page :)
Sampler of web sites that use ploticus.

Mon, 31 Dec 2001
Hello Mr. Steve Grubb,
First of all let me thank you for creating such a useful software for free. I think it is quite nice and useful.
I downloaded and compiled the latest release, and have couple of problems, some of which I fixed. I am running RedHat linux on my systems, so probably this is the reason you do not have the same problems on your Solaris machine. I wanted to share this information with you so that I may have a small contribution to Ploticus and to the free software community. I list at the end of e-mail the three problems that I encounter, and their fixes, if any.
I wish a happy new year to you and your family,
Okan Kolak okan@umiacs.umd.edu

Thu, 27 Dec 2001
Thanks for such a great app and the help you have provided....your are truly one of a kind
btw our charts are located on
this web site ....Under NHHD...then Charts from side menu Also.... Under Information... then Charts from Side Menu.
Floyd Jennings

Thu 20 Dec 2001
thanks so much and ploticus is a wonderful tool (happen to be wearing the t-shirt today too!),
Brett bdrake@wham.com

Thu, 13 Dec 2001
Excellent program but, as luck would have it, it won't cooperate!
[After writing back with a bug fix..] Yes that now works fine thanks.
I think that's one of the fastest bug fixes I have encountered in my 34 years in this business!
From: Peter Taylor PTaylor@hof.co.uk

Tue, 27 Nov 2001
I am running FreeBSD and am wondering what ported platform I should install - HP-UX or Linux?
Thanks for your time, This is definitely some great stuff you got going.....
From: Scott Humason Scott.Humason@rhiserv.com

Thu, 15 Nov 2001
Ploticus really rocks!, I couldn't find anything else to easily draw regions under fitted curves.
Thanks again,
Stephen Campbell Stephen@me.massey.landcare.cri.nz

Mon, 24 Sep 2001
Dear Mr. Grubb,
Thank you for you excellt software Ploticus. I have written a small patch to include ISO-8859-1 (Western Europe) support in Ploticus 1.41 and 2.0. The encoder is copied from Gnu Plot. As far as I understand from GPL, I can copy the PS encoder into ploticus. If so, please feel free to include this patch in comming versions of ploticus.
From: Johan Hedin johan@eCare.se

Fri, 14 Sep 2001
Hi Steve,
I am Mahesh from India. I am using ploticus for over 6 months and find it very useful tool. Basically I plot resource utilization reports etc.
From: mahesh.babbar@st.com

Fri, 3 Aug 2001
To: steve@sgpr.net
Subject: "Live data" with Ploticus
Hi Steve,
I am looking for a plotting software which allows display of the plot while the data are being read. My application tries to visualize data coming in from a magnetometer. As this is a continuous data stream there is no explicit "end" of a "data file", so a plotting tool which must read all data in before it plots them is not feasible.
I checked many plotting utilities, but found rarely one which offers that function. I also came across Ploticus and what I saw on the screenshots is amazing. I then looked through the Ploticus User Manual but I am still unsure whether Ploticus can solve my problem -- therefore I decided to ask you directly. (Hopefully I have not overlooked that information in the manual ... that would be embarrassing).
The only plotting tool I have found up to now which allows what I need are GNU plotutils. But they are unable to plot more than one graph at the same time, and I have a x, y and z value to display for every time tick...
From: Christian Reiber (chrei@en.muc.de)

30 Jul 2001
Steve,
Just wanted to pass along a note of thanks for developing Ploticus. We've found it to be of great use. Just thought you might want to know about an open source product we've released, FEZ-Probester, that invokes Ploticus.
http://www.fezhead.org/
--Eric Boyd (eboyd@solidspeed.com)

20 Jul 2001
I have created a new web graphic that may be useful for monitoring regional climate patterns at major SRCC cities or to be passed to SRCC clients. The graphs can be obtained from the "Climate Monitoring and Assessment" section of the SRCC homepage ("Climate Graphs for Cities in the Southern Region") or directly from:
http://www.srcc.lsu.edu/monitor_temp_precip.html
..Also here and here.
These graphs are updated each day at 6:10am using data through midnight of the previous day.
In the future, we will be making this a dynamic product that can be obtained for any COOP location in the region using a 'map' interface to UCAN data extraction routines.
The software package used to create the graphs is called PLOTICUS and is a fairly easy package to use. It can be used to create a variety of different plots that may prove to be very beneficial for us.
I have attached the PLOTICUS script file to show how these plots are created.
ps - The rainfall from Tropical Storm Allison shows up very nicely at the Houston, TX site, as well as the Baton Rouge and New Orleans sites.
Kevin Robbins (krobbins@mistral.srcc.lsu.edu)

7 Jul 2001
Steve,
Thanks for making ploticus available. I started using ipl after you posted it to comp.sources.unix way back when but I haven't had the need to do publication quality graphs for a couple of years. It was good to be able to pick up ploticus and be producing great graphs in no time. I apreciate some new features (or features I don't recall from last time). Catslide makes space so error bars don't overlap and gif output makes it easy to stick nice graphs in powerpoint. I'm about to try rangebar's features for calcuating medians etc on the fly rather than making SPSS do the calculations, spending time reformating the output and then invoking ploticus.
thanks again
Andrew Baillie (abaillie@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au)

3 Jul 2001
Hello,
we deployed ploticus to draw some currency information graphs at http://www.banky.sk/graphs/
We are pretty content with ploticus with just one exeption: when using 'tightcrop: yes' and 'scale' lower than about 0.65 in 'proc page', images are cropped too much - see http://www.banky.sk/graphs/nbs-eur-ms.png
But I hope we solve that soon.
Thank you very much for such great application.
Sincerely
Peter Hanecak (hanecak@megaloman.com)

30 Jun, 2001
Hi Steve,
Here is the link to the ploticus binaries. Please note that I have only compiled version 1.41 for pl and pltab only. It would be nice to have compiled the png stuff also, but I am quite happy for the moment to have the features available in 1.41 which are not in 1.39. If you do have some demand for the png binaries, let me know. I would like to add that Ploticus is a fantastic package, as you already know. We are currently using it to fully automate the monitoring CPU activity on our server, in addition to file transmission statistics. Our capacity management will soon include disk and database usage.
Thanks & Regards,
Michael Katsilis (mkatsili@socs.uts.edu.au)

27 Jun 2001
Hey Stephen!
Just wanted to drop you a line to say thanks for the software. Ploticus was a very quick, easy and robust solution for our web page.
I am using ploticus through Perl CGI scripting to create GIF images of stellar spectra, allowing users to get a "quick glance" at a spectra before downloading it's large (and cryptic) pixel file. Ploticus was so well suited for this task that our data formats never changed to accommodate Ploticus. With a few tweaks to the script file, I had GIF's being generated on the fly and delivered to web browsers within a day of development.
You can find this demonstration at our site http://stellar.phys.appstate.edu/ (through Online Spectra) where we are releasing data from our spectroscopic survey of the nearby stars ( within ~120 l.y.) through NASA's Nstars project. For more info, please visit the web page.
If you would like more info on how this Perl CGI creates and serves the GIF images with Ploticus, you can e-mail me at mcfaddnm@pm.appstate.edu
Thanks again!!!
-Michael "Flip" McFadden (mcfaddnm@pm.appstate.edu)

18 Jun 2001
Awesome! That is very cool. My only reservations before about using ploticus was it being non-GPL. (I used it anyways... Gnuplot can't compare for plotting actual data.)
I also have something sort of neat you might want to put up on the examples page:
http://mierle.com/keir/icqstats/
That is the generated statistics and graphs. The sources can be found at
http://mierle.com/keir/icqstat.tar.gz
I would suggest checking out the README for more information. (And bring a sense of humor!)
Thanks in advance,
Keir Mierle (keir@mierle.com)

15 Jun 2001
I'm sending this message again because my dumb mail system here ate the first one I think...sorry.
I have the UNIX emulator DJGPP in my windows path, I also used DJGPP to compile Ploticus.
You can download it from http://www.delorie.com/ for free. You need the "base" package and the "fileutil" package. Lots of other stuff there but you should not need it to just use Ploticus.
You also need "RM". "CAT" is kind of like DOS "Type" and "Copy", while "RM" is like "Delete".
There are other unix emulators out there, so if you can just find CAT and RM and put them in your path you might get it to go.
I did have to change the source code because the virgin Ploticus code passed a parameter that the DJGPP RM didn't like.
Steve, I was actually working on this stuff when the message came in after not touching it for a while (it was working).
I've exceeded the DOS command line limit of 127 chars for what I need to pass my scripts on the command line. I'd like to see Ploticus take the standard "@" redirection files. "@file". I'll probably take a stab at doing this code. Think there is some thing to do it in the http://www.snippets.org/ site.
Bob Paddock (BPADDOCK@joy.com)

14 Jun 2001
Dear Stephen,
This e-mail is to express my enthousiasm about ploticus. As a matter of fact I came to your webpage quite exidentally, I was "lured" there by your getgui program but that didn't get much attention (I'm sorry) after I saw ploticus.
I don't know how long and with howmany people you've been working on this but this is quite something and I'm surely going to use this frequently.
I've started my company something like a half a year ago and decided that I would be running Linux for a large part on an ideological basis (If I had done paid work in the extra time it cost me to setup everything under Linux I would have erned enough money to buy the most expensive office suite ever made). And it's paying off. The high "scriptability" is making my life a lot easier and I can now produce impressive documents with hardly any effort (well other than the actual contents of the document ofcourse).
What was missing was a good plot generation program. I don't want my documents to look like "Oh, he's using gnuplot" so I had the intention to write my own plot generation software in "off-time" to get out of the gnuplot stage. This development is now arrested due to your great effort called ploticus.
Moreover your software fits very nicely in the scriptability tradition as you prove with the the mouse phenome project.
I am considering a "credits" section in my report layout, I haven't made a decision about it yet, if so you'll be in it.
Again a very big thank you and keep up the good work.
Kind regards,
Jacco C. van Muiswinkel (jacco@vanmuiswinkel.nl)

11 Jun 2001
Hello Steve !
I'm working towards the end of a proof-of-concept project incorporating Ploticus 1.40. What happens is that I have set up a perl script to act as an email "bot". It takes a product number in the subject line as a parameter, and then uses perl DBI to get results from a MySQL database. The results are then input to Ploticus which then produces a graph that is returned as an email reply. Ploticus works really well in this - I'm very impressed!
What I need to know is, do you have any plans to make Ploticus a daemon ? I have done some timing figures on my PC and the system("pl ..." ) takes approximately 0.5 seconds ( but it's only a Pentium 150/48Mb). I would think that most of this overhead is perl doing a system call and loading Ploticus. I reckoned that if Ploticus was a daemon, most of the overhead would be removed - this is pure theory of course :-)
Even if it's not part of the Grand Design, it works really well- thanks for a great piece of software!
Best wishes,
Peter Garner (ptgarner@yahoo.com)

5 Jun 2001
Why not release Ploticus under the GPL?
I understand your want to stop potential forking, but your current license seems rather opposed to the open source philosophy.
Thanks in advance,
Keir Mierle keir@mierle.com

23 May 2001
First off, I would like to say that Ploticus is an amazing plotting application. I was fortunate enough to have found it early on in my search for a plotting tool. I love how much control I have over the appearance of a graph. We'll be using it in our current project (plotting stock data).
Jason Kwong jason_kwong@canada.com

22 May 2001
Steve:
I'm absolutely loving Ploticus... it is pretty easy to pick up and quite versitile, and it puts out nice looking graphs.
--Ken Speich (kspeich@cidera.com)

14 May 2001
Thanks Stephen! It looks fantastic now!
I am using Ploticus for my network statistics reporting. The plots looks great! Much better than the previous graphics package that I have used. Ploticus gives me more control on the colors, positioning, etc. Unfortunately, I am handling sensitive data and would not be able to share my results.
Thanks again!
Regards
Lee Lee Chan lee.lee.chan@sap.com

25 Apr 2001
Steve,
We've used your ploticus program for making some pie charts in an = electoral system, it was quite usefull since it wasn't that hard to = learn how to use it, and it's very fast, even while using an old P 200 = mmx with linux red hat 6.1.
I you want to see some examples, go there:
msa.istari.com.ar/voting/capital/000042/BUECON.htm
Greetings,
PS: When are we going to have some 3d graphics?
thanks
Gabriel E. Pati gpatino@msa.com.ar

26 Apr 2001
Hey Steve, ploticus is really an amazing piece of software. Good job !
Dierk (from Germany) Dierk.Laube@jci.com

19 Apr 2001
Hi Steve! You are doing a great job with Ploticus! I'd like to know if you are planning to include WBMP as an output format in a near future version of your product.
Thanks!
Claudio F. Alonso F_Alonso@miniphone.com.ar
PS: Go on, I really like your product!

17 Apr 2001
Thank you for responding, but I've figured it out. I had xautorange set, but the line refused to draw to the very last point. So, I changed the xautorange to xrange and set the range 20 minutes longer that needed [instead of it being 2300, I set it for 2350], and now it works.
Thanks Anyway. Besides that little problem, so far I've really enjoyed Ploticus.
Tammy Hower HowerT@hsn.net

10 Apr 2001
I am trying to use Ploticus on an HP/3000 (using the Andreas Schmidt port of the code). Very impressive application. Thank you very much for providing it to the community free of charge.
I am having a problem though. Apparently you can assign a fieldname to a field but there is no way to use that fieldname in the legend. As a matter of fact, as far as I can tell the legendlabel has to be hard coded into the Ploticus file as a text string constant. Is there some way in Ploticus of linking the fieldname to the legendlabel? Personally I wish that you could specify an option in #proc legend to say to use fieldnames for legendlabels by default for all plotted data.
Thank you.
Michael P. Smith MpSmith@hertz.com

21 Mar 2001
Brilliant! Excellent! Works fine!
This removes the last obstacle for a go to production with ploticus here at Renault V.I. trucks (Volvo group, also Mack Trucks). We'll be using it for intranet publication, so unfortunately I cannot provide a site link.
Again, thanks a million, excellent package!
Michael Tonkin mike.lives@home.se

14 Mar 2001
Over the years printing graphs on Unix seems to be a constant test of ones ingenuity; I think [ploticus] is going to prove popular ... perhaps even a productivity benchmark,
Stephanie Nile stephie@connect.org.uk

13 Mar 2001
Hi Steve,
thanks for an excellent peice of software! Very nifty.
I have seen on boutell.com that the gd1.3 library should no longer be used, and hence GIF problems. Therefore, I ported your ploticus to gd1.8, and altered all GIF code to JPEG code. Most of it is '%s/gif/jpeg/g' type stuff, although I also altered the 'Emember' calls and whatever I could identify as GIFfy code.
..
This all compiled without warnings. I've only tested on Linux, but I'll be trying out an IRIX and SunOS port later this week. As I probably know the Ploticus code better than the actual functionality, my tests have been rather lightweight, but I will try out some more stuff tomorrow. Your use of the gd was very clean, so the porting was quite easy.
Yes, this all needs to be cleaned up, but I've only spent 2 evenings on it.Do you wish me to send your code revisited?
Thanks again ! Have a nice day!
Michael Tonkin mike.lives@home.se

27 Feb 2001
Hello mister Grubb,
We are using your programm for our website www.kweekvijver.com to = display ambient temperature and light level.
I have a LDR and NTC resistor connected to a joystick port on a Suse 6.4 = Linux Petium 200Mhz system. The system polls the joystick port = continuously and updates a MySQL database (v. 3.23.33) everey minute. I = have another Linux system running Suse 7.0, which act as a slave during = replicating the MySQL database. On the second machine a Perl script = running as a CRONTAB job checks the database every 5 minutes, extracts = the data, does some pre-processing and parses it to Ploticus (v.1.40).
Then the Perl script uploads the PNG graphics to the website. Then every = visitor to our www.kweekvijver.com site can check the actual temperature = here in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. I'm still working on a page = (including some pictures) to show people how it works!
Thank you for your nice program and greetings from a cold Rotterdam.
Jaco, Kweekvijver k5r@kweekvijver.com

23 Feb 2001
Steve,
Kudos goes to you. We have implemented your program letting our users know the beam current of our neutron source here at Argonne National Laboratories here in Chicago, IL. I would like to extend my thanks to your development of the program and would like to give you a link to our page that is using it currently. The link is grinehart.pns.anl.gov/operations. This link will be changed in the next month or so, but I will keep you posted. If you would like to add this to your list of real world examples please feel free. I also could give you our script to use as an example as well, if you wish. Thanks again and have a great weekend!!
Matthew Kwiatkowski mattk@anl.gov

20 Feb 2001
Thanks for the program, it looks like it will save me a lot of time, if I can get around these few learning curve problems of mine.
Bob Paddock BPADDOCK@joy.com

19 Feb 2001
Hi Steve,
Thanks for this good program!
I produced the whole test suite on my MPE box without problems ... and already published this on my Ploticus web site www.hillschmidt.de/ploticus. Did you receive a copy of the HP3000 Newswire article: www.hillschmidt.de/gbr/ploticus-0009.html.
Thanks again for the great work!
Best regards, Andreas Schmidt, Germany aschmid4@csc.com

15 Feb 2001
Steve,
I've been using your ploticus for about 2 months now.....GREAT WORK!!! It's made my life much easier for "automagically" plotting statistics from our data network.
I do have one suggestion. I have had problems creating graphs with multiple lineplot's. The problem being that the yautorange can only take 1 field to determine the range (So, if the other field is not relatively close, then it appears outside the bounds of the graph).
To help with this, I've updated the autorange.c file, to allow you to specify a comma delimited list of values for the datarange option.
Anyway, hope you can make use of this code in a future release.
Thanks
Paul Totten pwtotten@nortelnetworks.com

14 Feb 2001
Dear Steve,
I use your program pl for plotting graphs and I like it very much but I seem to be running into a little bug. When I use the #proc rangebar and give a negative value for the barloc parameter it doesn't seem to plot in the right way....
Is this a known bug, or am I doing something wrong?
Andre van der Hoeven Andre.vanderHoeven@dutlru2.lr.tudelft.nl

10 Feb 2001
Hello Mr. Steve Grubb,
I am planning to use ploticus in my current project to generate graphs. This tool is really amazing & I am sure that I'll achieve what I want through this tool.
I need to draw "Staked Area" & "Percentage Staked Area" filled line graphs with legends. Ploticus provides me this facility in bar type graph but not in "Filled Line Graphs", Is there any way to do this?
I am attaching the sample of graphs I am looking for. Please suggest me the way to achieve this.
Vijay Hajare Vijay.Hajare@in.bosch.com

26 Jan 2001
Steve,
Ploticus is a great package. I have tried many different open source and commercial plotting packages to display climate data but none handle dates on the dependent axis as well, and as simply, as Ploticus. You can view samples of the plots i am creating at: www.srcc.lsu.edu/temp_precip.html
... more will follow using your Ploticus package.
I am having a small problem with [handling missing data]..
If I can get past this missing data problem using 'lineplot' I will be generating near real-time plots that will depict the current status of precipitation across the Southern U.S. This would be a great addition to my site. Any help that you can provide will be appreciated.
Thanks again for a great package....
Kevin Robbins krobbins@mistral.srcc.lsu.edu

31 Jan 2001
hello steve.
you did a nice job on ploticus and it make ploting graph in unix more exciting as ever.
Kek Yee Teoh kek.yee.teoh@intel.com

22 Jan 2001
Hey Steven,
You are terrific and great! ( your software, too :) ) I must say that I have done a lot of research looking for graphical software that I could use in C/C++ programs. I even considered MATLAB C/C++ compiler but I think that your software has better graphical implementation and layout.
Now, I have a next question but it does not create much of a problem to me: right now my C code saves the code for ploticus to the file and then I am using system command to create a gif picture. Is there a way to create a gif or png pictures on the fly? (without storing the ploticus code to the file and then calling "pl -gif *.html" ) But even if this is not possible I still think that this is a great software and I have been using this for a while.
Thanks again
Pawel Szczodruch paul.szczodruch@libhamp.com

22 Jan 2001
Dear Steve,
searching for a tool to create bar and pie charts on a Linux system, my search on the web came up with Ploticus. I downloaded the latest source code and it compiled out of the box on my Linux system running RedHat 6.1. I am really amazed about the quality of the plots. As it turned out, the pltab utility is very handy to create nice EPS-files of my wave statistic data tables.
A small problem concerning the [eps] bounding box occurred .. In general it would be very good, if the bounding box always starts with 0 0. In this case the EPS-file could be easily translated into the PDF-Format for use with pdflatex.
Hope this helps to improve your great tools
Lothar Birk L.Birk@ism.TU-Berlin.de

07 Jan 2001
Hello,
I have written a program called PHPLOT which creates graphs in PHP. I started writing it in 1998 and its grown since then. PHPLOT is only for server side dynamic graphs - and just for display on a web browser. www.phplot.com PHPLOT is freeware and released under the GPL and PHP licenses.
I came across your site and noticed that ploticus is an excellent program and has a scope that I can only hope PHPLOT will have some day.
My question: You have a very nice gallery of examples of how to use ploticus. I was wondering if it would be ok to some of the data from the examples to create a similar gallery of examples for PHPLOT? I really like the fact that the data is "real" in the sense that it comes from real world examples.
Sincerely, A Ottenheimer afan@jeonet.com

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