Ptplot 2.0 - Java Plotter

Authors Edward A. Lee Christopher Hylands Contributors Lukito Muliadi William Wu

Description

• Embeddable in applets or applications.
• Binary or ASCII data.
• Auto-ranging.
• Automatic or manual labeling of axes.
• Automatic or manual tick marks.
• Logarithmic axes.
• Live, animated plots.
• Infinite zooming.
• Various plot styles: connected lines, scatter plot, bars, etc.
• Various point styles: none, dots, points, and unique marks.
• Multiple data sets and a legend.
• Color or black and white plotting.
• Error bars.

There is a set of demonstrations of these classes. The main class implementing the plotter component is Plot. It is derived from PlotBox, which provides only the axes and decorations of the plot. This is implemented in a base class so that it can be reused for different kinds of plots. Live (animated) data plots are supported by the PlotLive class. This class is abstract; a derived class must be created to generate the data to plot (or collect it from some other application).

TwoPlotExample is a very simple sample Ptplot application.

A more complex application is implemented by the PlotApplication class. The PlotApplication class includes support for printing and generating HTML for use with the Plot applet. The ptplot shell script starts up PlotApplication from a Unix shell prompt.

Backward compatibility with the C pxgraph program is provided by the Pxgraph class.

This code owes a heavy debt to David Harrison, the original author of xgraph, which runs under the X window system on Unix platforms. An extension to xgraph called pxgraph, written by Joe Buck, reads binary files as well as ASCII. For compatibility with these programs, we have provided a Bourne Shell script called pxgraph that is a drop-in replacement for either xgraph or pxgraph. Unlike the original program, however, the Java implementation does not depend on the X window system. We have provided a DOS batch file called pxgraph.bat that brings pxgraph capability to Windows platforms.