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OOo gives chart module a brand new look (Linux.com)
Linux.com
looks at recent improvements to the OO.o chart module.
"Want to see a dinosaur? Press the Chart button in OpenOffice.org Calc, and you will be presented with a real software relic. While other parts of OpenOffice.org have been thoroughly redesigned and updated, the features and the overall look of the chart module remain virtually untouched since version 1.0. The situation is changing, though, as a group of OpenOffice.org developers has started to work on a new chart module. The first results of their endeavors were presented on this year's OOoCon. Here is what they've done so far."
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This will hopefully fix one showstopper Posted Oct 6, 2006 2:32 UTC (Fri) by goonie (subscriber, #4252) [Link] At the moment, OOO's graphs are completely unusable for scientific work because you can't add error bars with user-supplied data. Without them, you simply can't prepare charts for use in academic publications using OOO, and thus it is simply cannot replace Microsoft Office for most academics working in technical fields (yes, many academics use LaTeX and other graphing tools to produce their papers, but not all do).
Many users have complained about this on the OOO bug database, but the reply has always been "you'll have to wait for the new graphing module".
It's great to see that this module is, finally, not too far away from deployment.
How's the speed? Posted Oct 6, 2006 13:18 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] I found OO Chart completely unusable for more than a few hundreddata points. It's a cool toy for small charts, but for anything serious, I had to fall back on gnuplot.
So is this new module more scalable/efficient than the old one?
What are the (free) competitors? Posted Oct 6, 2006 19:15 UTC (Fri) by stevenj (subscriber, #421) [Link] The major (i.e. relatively maintained and featureful) free competitors for plotting seem to be:
(And, of course, an appalling number of moribund plotting projects on SourceForge, from GLplot to KMatplot.) Of these, the only one I have found suitable for publication-quality scientific plots is Grace. Have I missed any? There are also an appalling number of packages that invent their own scripting syntax (Grace has done it twice). For this kind of thing, I wish they would just use Octave (a MATLAB clone), or NumPy, or anything as long as you don't reinvent the wheel. (The "office" plot packages seem more oriented towards 3d bar charts and similar eye-candy that I wouldn't be caught dead using. Read one of Edward Tufte's books, e.g. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information if you don't know why this kind of distracting "chartjunk" is a bad idea.)
What are the (free) competitors? Posted Oct 6, 2006 19:49 UTC (Fri) by welinder (guest, #4699) [Link] You missed R which probably is way beyond the others for this purpose.
What are the (free) competitors? Posted Oct 6, 2006 20:34 UTC (Fri) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link] PGPLOT (not entirely free) and PLPLOT are used in astronomical publications sometimes.
I wrote my own plotting program (which only would output Postscript) in grad school, and then wrote another whole plotting program for <a href="http://brahms.phy.vanderbilt.edu/~rknop/research/papers/h...">this paper</a>....
-Rob
What are the (free) competitors? Posted Oct 6, 2006 20:39 UTC (Fri) by dberkholz (subscriber, #23346) [Link] I've created publication-quality gnuplot graphs. Something like this works well:set term postscript eps color lw 4 solid "Helvetica" 24 You also may be interested in PyXPlot, a new grace-like program that's designed to create better graphs.
What are the (free) competitors? Posted Oct 6, 2006 20:40 UTC (Fri) by dberkholz (subscriber, #23346) [Link] Woops, make that *gnuplot*-like.
What are the (free) competitors? Posted Oct 7, 2006 3:20 UTC (Sat) by wjhenney (guest, #11768) [Link] I've created publication-quality gnuplot graphs. "publication quality" is a pretty meaningless phrase really. Ten years ago I used to use PGPLOT for the figures in my published papers. I wouldn't do that now, but plenty of people still do (or worse, Supermongo!) On the other hand, gnuplot's postscript driver does not produce very pleasing output IMNSHO. For example, although it is possible to do superscripts, greek letters, etc, the results look very ugly (no proper kerning, for instance). It is possible to get nice-looking output from gnuplot by using the metapost or ps/latex driver, or, alternatively, postprocessing the postscript with something like psfrag. I used to faff around with terrible hacks like that, until I discovered PyX.
What are the (free) competitors? Posted Oct 7, 2006 4:09 UTC (Sat) by dberkholz (subscriber, #23346) [Link] Yep, that's a lot more important in fields I'm not in. I don't need to use funny symbols or equations as axis labels.
What are the (free) competitors? Posted Oct 17, 2006 19:44 UTC (Tue) by kreutzm (subscriber, #4700) [Link] What is your problem is supermongo? Except for the fact that it is not free software I found its output quite satisfying, much better than gnuplot. Of course, it is limited (e.g. 2D) and a little archaic in usage. But once I accepted those, I was quite happy.
What are the (free) competitors? Posted Oct 7, 2006 3:02 UTC (Sat) by wjhenney (guest, #11768) [Link] Have I missed any? Yeah, a few. There are the myriad python-based ones for a start, of which the most notable are mathplotlib and PyX. These would seem to answer your complaint about inventing their own scripting syntax. PyX is my favourite - the output is head and shoulders above anything else I have seen from an aesthetic point of view, and the software design is beautiful too. Once you have used it for a while, then everything else starts to look a bit tatty. PyXplot, which is mentioned in another comment, is a new ``user-friendly'', gnuplot-like front-end to PyX, although I haven't tried it yet. Non-python alternatives, apart from those already mentioned, include asymptote and ePiX, not forgetting metapost and pstricks for those who like bizarre syntax. For serious 3D work, it is hard to beat VTK and its frontends, such as MayaVi.
What are the (free) competitors? Posted Oct 21, 2006 13:20 UTC (Sat) by anton (guest, #25547) [Link] Have I missed any?I do the graphs for my publications in Postscript (edit with Emacs, view with gv). Starting with a similar existing graph, this takes about a quarter of an hour for the first graph in a paper, and then 1-2 minutes apiece for additional similar ones. See my EPS Gallery; most of these graphs went into published papers (hmm, I should put up some of my newer stuff there).
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