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<title>ploticus: user comments and feedback</title>
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  <table cellpadding=2 width=550><tr>
  <td><br><h2>User comments and feedback</h2></td>
  <td align=right>
  <small>
  <a href="../doc/Welcome.html"><img src="../doc/ploticus.gif" border=0></a><br>
  <a href="../doc/Welcome.html">Welcome</a> &nbsp; &nbsp;
  <a href="../gallery/index.html">Gallery</a> &nbsp; &nbsp;
  <a href="../doc/Contents.html">Handbook</a> 
  <td></tr></table>
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<br>
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<title>Manual page for User_comments_and_feedback(PL)</title>
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This page is a summary of comments and feedback, good and bad, from users
of ploticus.  Usually questions, bug reports, and feature requests
are edited out, since these are summarized in the 
<a href="../doc/Faq.html">FAQ</a> or the 
<a href="../doc/Versions.html">What's New page</a>.
I may also edit feedback for brevity.
<br>
To post to this page, send email to 
scg@jax.org.  It may take some time before I have a chance
to summarize mail and get it on this page.
I have taken the liberty of including names and email addresses,
if this is not suitable for you please let me know.
<br>
<br>
This page is for comments posted before Jan 1 '01.
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
26 Nov 2000 
<br>
Hi,
<br>
Your program is super!!!  Using it on Win2k Professional.
You can see our graph at:
<a href="http://gunnadb.home.att.net/">gunnadb.home.att.net</a>
<br>
Stan Gunn
<br>
<a href="http://win2000tips.home.att.net/">W2k Tips and Tricks</a>
<br>
<a href="http://gunnadb.home.att.net/">ADB Tips and Tricks</a>
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
18 Nov 2000
<br>
We're calculating the summary stats in MySQL which is a
lot quicker than passing the unit record data to ploticus when there is
a lot of it, which is why the ability to use values is important to us.
apart from this, smooth sailing so far with ploticus - very nice indeed
and much easier to control programmatically than Grace, which we also
use. Am beginning to think about an object-oriented Python wrapper for
ploticus - do you know of any similar work in this direction? One
advantage Grace has is the ability to read input from a named pipe, as
well as write to stdout, which means it can sit in memory waiting for
commands. 
<br>
[Even so], keeping ploticus in memory as a long-running process is not really an
issue given the small size of the binary. Better to concentrate on new
graphical features and speed optimisation when called as a one-shot process,
and just give up and die in the face of an error. On our new linux server
the binary is clearly cached permanently in memory so the start-up latency
is really small anyway, particularly compared to how long it takes to pull
the necessary data out of MySQL.
<br>
Cheers,
<br>
Tim Churches &nbsp;&nbsp; tchur@bigpond.com
<br>
Sydney, Australia
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
15 Nov 2000 
<br>
Hi Steve
<br>
Ploticus is really cool! ;) Thanks
<br>
Henrique C. M. Andrade &nbsp;&nbsp; hcma@cs.umd.edu
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
10 Nov 2000 
<br>
Hello Steve,
<br>
I downloaded and compiled version 1.39 today when I
noticed the looping example.  This seems very nice!  Do
you expect to add the autorange of Y values from a variable
number of series any time soon?  With this, the plot file would
be independent (somewhat) of the data file, and that would
be nice.
<br>
Another related item I would like to see is specification of
Legend labels, Title, etc, all coming from the data file
(or perhaps comments in the data file that have directives
in them, or an auxiliary data file).  This way I could write a
"generic" plot file (without resorting to plot file templates),
and pump many sent of data into it w/o touching each up
for these details.
<br>
I look foward to seeing what you do for the next release. Overall,
I can make it do what I need, but it takes a little work to create
many similar graphs from scripts.  Thanks again for such a nice
plotting tool!
<br>
Michael D. Beynon &nbsp;&nbsp; beynon@cs.umd.edu
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
1 Nov 2000 
<br>
Hi Steve!
<br>
We are evaluating your excellent software for possible
use in our admittedly all JAVA environment.
I've been using the software all of last week and find
more and more powerful as I use it, however, I ran into
a problem on Friday that I cannot seem to resolve.
On Friday afternoon it simply stopped plotting.
Yesterday I was able to investigate why and saw that
the /var/tmp directory that it was using was filled up
and there was no more room on the slice. I cleaned up the
directory and even bounced the Apache server, but I still
cannot see the plots.
<br>
[This turned out to be a local sysadmin problem]
<br>
Rudy Gireyev &nbsp;&nbsp; rgireyev@styleclick.com
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
31 Oct 2000 
<br>
Hi,
<br>
I wish to thank you for producing an excellent program which makes generating
graphs an extremely easy task..
<br>
Graham Smith &nbsp;&nbsp; gqs@zip.com.au
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
30 Oct 2000 
<br>
Ploticus is lovely! I just showed it to a friend whose father
(coincidentally) was looking for something to produce charts of patient
data for his practice (being a doctor). The examples are so relevant! :-)
<br>
Al B. Snell &nbsp;&nbsp; alaric@alaric-snell.com
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
26 Oct 2000 
<br>
Hello Steve
<br>
I found your ploticus software on the net and I'm very interested to test
and use it. Now I have the following questions:
<li>Can you use different fonts in the same graph (PS or EPS-output)?
<li>Do you plan to use cmyk-colordefinitions for PS- and EPS-output?
<br>
Mattias Dillier &nbsp;&nbsp; Matthias.Dillier@snb.ch
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
25 Oct 2000 
<br>
hello.
<br>
I'm a happy user of Ploticus, which I use on Linux to make mainly
time evolution graphs: software size/time, anomaly numbers/time, ...
<br>
I call ploticus from Python, as an external command.
I tried many other packages on Python, intended to make graphs,
but Ploticus is the one with the best date support I know of.
<br>
Pierre Hanser &nbsp;&nbsp; Pierre.Hanser@sxb.bsf.alcatel.fr
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
27 Sep 2000
<br>
Hey Steve:
<br>
We are testing out your awesome ploticus program. We compiled the source
code on a Linux Redhat 6.2 box and it is running very well. It is a very
versatile crisp clear image builder which displays our live data very
efficiently.
<br>
Roger McGetchie 
<br>
Roger.McGetchie@ec.gc.ca
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
19 Sep 2000
<br>
Thank you very much.
This is working!
I think you wrote one good graphing application!
Thanks
<br>
Pawel Szczodruch
<br>
pszczo1@uic.edu
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
22 Aug 2000
<br>
Thanks for a great product, I think this is what I was looking
for to replace the GNU plotting utilities (the output didn't
look right).
<br>
Alberto Alonso
<br>
a_alonso@netzero.net
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
14 Aug 2000
<br>
Steve,
<br>
Thanks for the info.  I was unsure what symbol to use to call the declared
variable.  That worked like a charm.  Keep up the good work.  I am really
pleased how flexible and handy that Ploticus is to use.
Have a great day.
<br>
Richard Canada
<br>
richard.canada@mrl-crl.com
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
04 Aug 2000 
<br>
We ahve been very pleased with ploticus.  We have converted
half of our graphs (from motif/kl widgets) in 3 days.  Thanks for the
use of the program.  When we are finished porting our graphs and we have
something online, i'll send you a link.
<br>
Also, have you considered setting up a mailling list for ploticus?  i
would setup one for you, but i'm not sure my home dsl connection could
handle it.  Perhaps when my company gets our server up we could host it.
i'll ask.  If there is anyone who is working on that, please let me
know.  It would be useful if we could all contribute to supporting this
program.  And i am sure that you get tired of answering the same
questions over and over again.
<br>
darcy w. christ
<br>
darcy@elegant.com
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
3 Aug 2000
<br>
Steve,
<br>
I am evaluating ploticus for presenting data internal to our organization.  It
is a likely choice given the beautiful job you have done with it, easof use,
portability, and variety of output types.
<br>
However, I am having difficulty with a minor point which I have not been able
to answer for myself when reading the documentation.
<br>
I want to make a line plot with grid lines at major and minor ticks while only
labeling the major ticks.
<br>
How do I get the grid lines on the minor ticks?
<br>
Marc Schwarzschild 
<br>
ms@millburncorp.com
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
1 Aug 2000
<br>
Hi Steve,
<br>
We are evaluating ploticus to use with our software InSPEC
<a href="http://www.elegant.com">www.elegant.com</a>.  
So far everything looks quite promising.  One
quick question for you.  There seems to be a discrepancy between the way
that the label text is formated in the x11 version and the png version.
In the x11 version, the letters in the labels are right side up, whereas
the letters in the pngs are on their side, running up.  Is there a way
to change this?  Why does this happen?
<br>
Darcy W. Christ
<br>
<darcy@elegant.com>
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
30 Jul 2000
<br>
Hi
<br>
First of all: well done ! in my opinion ploticus is a great tool.
Secondly, I have a question:
Is there a way to determine the width of a bar (each bar)
within the data file instead of using an explicit command:
'barwidth n' ?
<br>
If this feature does not exist:
<br>
-It seems to me this is a very important feature for figures
 that draw many bars (hundreds or thousands).
<br>
-I don't understand why the user may control the length of the
 bar (through a data-file) but not its width.
<br>
Thanks, 
<br>
Tsafrir Dan 
<br>
dants@cs.huji.ac.il
<br>

<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
19 Jul 2000
<br>
Steve, I just came across ploticus and it looks great! I thought
I'd let you know that the URL for the PNG home page, which is
referred to on the page "Making web based graphs" (web.html) has
changed to http://www.libpng.org/pub/png effective May 3, 2000.
<br>
David King
<br>
drk@elegant.com
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
14 Jul 2000
<br>
Hi Steve,
<br>
Ploticus is great.  I have hacked up preliminary svg support for
ploticus.  I'll pass it along in a couple of days when it's in a little
better shape.
<br>
-Doug
<br>
dorr@mail.ffnet.com
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
13 Jul 2000 
<br>
Dear Steve Grubb,
<br>
I downloaded ploticus some time ago and will certainly use it to produce
on-the-fly evaluation pictures for a specialized web system, as well as for
scientific data representation in publications.
<br>
I regard the underlying idea as really ingenious and the resulting pictures
as brilliant!
<br>
Nevertheless, let me pose some bits of constructive critisism   :-)
<br>
# The executable name "pl" might conflict with the usual invocation of
prolog (which at least I use on my system), with prolog presumably being
around somewhat longer. I'd propose to change the standard name to
something like ploti or even ploticus, which isn't soooo long as to detain
someone from using it.
<br>
# I am not able to use the -stdin feature to create my desired on-the-fly
graphics. ...
<br>
Yours sincerely,
<br>
P. Roosen
<br>
roosen@vollmer-roosen.de
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
11 Jul 2000 
<br>
Hi Steve,
<br>
I have a question regarding the new proc datesetting.
If omitweekends is yes, does this mean that weekend data is added to Monday's
data ? I'm not sure how to interpret this sentence in the documentation:
<br>
Any Saturday or Sunday dates will be silently adjusted to the nearest weekday.
<br>
If so, will it be possible to enhance Ploticus so that also the data is skipped
? This is very helpful in analysing CPU Performance Data. An obsolete product
did exactly this: if "Ignore Weekends" has been activated all data of Sat and
Sun are completely thrown away and were not shown in the graph.
<br>
If not, then ignore this (but probably clearify for non-native speakers like me
;-)
<br>
P.S. The article on Ploticus/iX will be published in Aug or Sep if HP3000
Newswire editor agrees.
<br>
Best regards, Andreas
<br> 
aschmid4@csc.com
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
10 Jul 2000 
<br>
I'm just dropping you a note to let you know that I've installed
Ploticus and am using it to generate weather summaries for my personal
web site.  
<br>
Here is the URL:
<a href="http://bubo.hmsc.orst.edu/~edstrom/wthr.shtml">
http://bubo.hmsc.orst.edu/~edstrom/wthr.shtml</a>
<br>
It works well.  Its pretty fast, versatile and produces clean, crisp
images that survive GIFification reasonably well.
<br>
Please keep me informed of updates to the package.
<br>
John Edstrom edstrom@Poopsie.hmsc.orst.edu
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
6 Jul 2000 
<br>
Steve
<br>
It is done.
Those .eps and .ps I need to prepare are for being used in LaTex docs.
So, I have asked for help to some spanish users of latex.  Jose Luis Diaz
suggested the following [I will not make a plain translation. If you do
not understand the following, then you could see the original text [in spanish,
attached] and look for a translator -human preferently :-)
<br>
The problem is that the fonts [ps] do not have the characters in the same
position than the standart ISO-Latin 1.  Then, the solution is to
recodify the fonts for the resulting output.ps.
For a file named tabla.ps, in a linux box do the following:
<br>
<pre>
$ head -n 6 tabla.ps > aux.ps
$ cat reencode.enc >> aux.ps
$ tail -n +7 tabla.ps >> aux.ps
$ mv aux.ps tabla.ps
</pre>
<br>
These inserts the code reencode.enc [see the attachment]  after
the line  %%EndComments in the file tabla.ps generated with ploticus.
<br>
If everything goes right you should see the right character there.
<br>
That's it.
<br>
PS The attached .ps has an invented word.
IMPORTANT: I have no idea if the recoding will affect any of the other
characters.
<br>
Emilio emilio@noanet.com.ar
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
2 Jul 2000 
<br>
Steve
<br>
I like your pl and pltab programs. They are nice, fast and relatively easy to
use. Yet I have not decided to use them because I will need to have annotations
made in Spanish in the resulting pics. I have skimmed through the
documentation, so maybe I am bothering you for something I did not check
properly. If so, then sorry.  So, here are some questions:
<br>
- How could I use accented characters in Title?  
For instance:  Title: Poblacin de Mamferos de Tucumn. 
<br>
- And remember the  too.
<br>
- What about underlining words in titles?
<br>
I could make the annotations with some other packages  [I use linux OS, so 
plenty of good  options to do so]. But then,  the 'automated and unattended way'
philosophy will be gone.  I have skimmed though the documentation, so maybe I
am bothering for something I did not check properly. If so, then sorry.
<br>
PS: I am learning from the examples you have included in the doc. Very good
docs! 
<br>
Emilio Flores emilio@noanet.com.ar
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
26 Jun 2000 
<br>
Hello,
<br>
I'm using ploticus to draw some graph (not common isn't it ;-)) in perl
script. i want to write a perl module for this usage, but before start
this i would ask you if you know a project like this ?
<br>
I will use ploticus to draw some collected value from my system agents
hiways (http://hiways.org/ . no english translation for now. sorry).
<br>
you're doing a good job. don't stop.
<br>
bye
<br>
PS : I'm french and my english is very bad. i hope you will understand
me.
<br>
BERGAMO Jean-Louis jlb@ecila.fr
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
18 Jun 2000 
<br>
Hi Steve,
<br>
I've downloaded ploticus, and VERY quickly was able to be highly
productive with your beautiful package.
<br>
I am using your package to create stock graphs, from stock data, just as
you have shown in the example.  It takes maybe 2 seconds to produce the
graph, where on yahoo's site, whatever they are doing, it is
instantaneous (I am using a cable modem).  Is there anyway I can
increase the performance of your package? *Any* thoughts on performance
enhancement for web delivered dynamically generated graphics would be
great!!
<br>
Also, do you think that with the advent of XML a lot of this gif/png
creation will not have to be done at all  on the server side(for dynamic
web page delivery of these types of graphics), ... and instead, the
vector drawing will be simply done by the client? (at this time, the
only vendor that supports this type of thing is, (I think) microsoft
which has something called VML
(http://www.microsoft.com/mind/0100/VML/VML.asp ), but I love linux and
just can't get myself to go back to using or developing on windows....)
<br>
In any case,
Thanks for a fantastic software tool !!!!!!!
<br>
Dave Linenberg
 dlinenbe@home.com
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
15 Jun 2000 
<br>
Hi.  I've only been using ploticus for about a day.  So far I like it
a lot.
<br>
I do have a problem and I haven't seen it mentioned in the release
notes.  I'm running linux 2.2.16, adapted from RedHat 6.2.  The
compiler and libraries are pretty up-to-date.  Its a dual processor
workstation, if that is relevant.
<br>
The problem is this: I want to make some graphs from data
(temperature, atmospheric pressure, wind strength, and humidity) from
a weather station periodically through the day.  Each graph is
separate and independent of the others, i.e. its not a composite
graph.  I use a perl scipt to get the data from the data base and
generate a command/data text stream that is sent to pl via stdin.
I have a loop that cycles throught the several data types drawing
graphs .. and then a loop to print the data into the pipe.
<br>
I've verified that it all works OK; I get what I expect when I run the
perl script from the command line.  However, when I run the script
from a cron job, the first graph is OK, but the following graphs have
the data from the first graph superimposed on it, as if they are both
being plotted together as a single data set.  It takes all of the
labels, scaling factors, symbol colors and other attributes from the
most recent, i.e. 'correct' data set, but plots the first and Nth data
sets.  I'm using simple scatterplots.
<br>
I'm baffled.  Like I say, it works just fine from the command line (I
use tcsh usually) but the script is called from within a shell (bash)
script file.
<br>
The script, run frrom the command line or crond, both produce nice,
well behaved files in /usr/tmp with unique names derived from their
respective pids and they disappear between data-type loops in the main
perl script.  I don't have a clue where the initial data set is being
fossilized.
<br>
I have noticed that if I slow down the execution of the script (it
normally only takes a few seconds to rip through the 5 graphs), the
error becomes intermittent.  I'm wondering if doesn't have something
to do with the pl prgram 'sticking' in memory during a cron job, or
something weird like that.
<br>
Do you have any ideas about what is wrong here?  Or, what routines
might have be fooled by tained memory on startup?  Any tips would be
greatly appreciated.
<br>
John Edstrom edstrom@bubo.hmsc.orst.edu
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
27 Jun 2000 
<br>
Mr. Grubb,
<br>
I have recently been using your excellent Ploticus on an HP 3000 
minicomputer running MPE/iX.  A Mr. Andreas Schmidt ported Ploticus to MPE 
(see http://www.hillschmidt.de/ploticus/).  I only have one question: How 
do I continue one line to another in my source file?  I need to specify 
several fieldnames in #proc getdata, but I want to use multiple lines to 
do so.
<br>
Any hints would be greatly appreciated.
<br>
Benji York  benji_york@cal-na.com
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
27 Jun 2000 
<br>
Just wanted to send you a quick note of thanks for Ploticus.  It's an
awesome graphing program.  I've been using gnuplot for many years, and was
always somewhat annoyed by the lack of support for a few specific things i
wanted to do.  Finally, after several fruitless quests for a Better
Plotting Program, i found Ploticus (thanks to Google.com!) and all is
well.
<br>
In case you are interested, here's my "big" project with Ploticus:
<br>
<a href="http://www.ewranglers.com/ThermLogs/temp.html">
http://www.ewranglers.com/ThermLogs/temp.html</a>
<br>
 See ya,
<br>
Johan van Zanten johan@ewranglers.com			   
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
26 Jun 2000 
<br>
Per you website correspondence clause, 
<br>
I'm using ploticus to monitor system resource usage among some machines.
Basically, memory usage vs time.
<br>
A more interesting use, I recently put ploticus too, was plotting a 24
acre property parcel map boundary from government data (marker, plus
bearings and distance), and then adding in landmarks (roads, waterways,
..) via data from a GPS.
<br>
Brian Litzinger brian@litzinger.com
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
25 Jun 2000
<br>
Dear Steve:
<br>
I hit your website when I surf around. Your ploticus is great, so is
your website.  It is even more wonderful that you ditribute to Linux
community for free.
<br>
Solute to you!
<br>
Xiaoqiang Su x-su@uchicago.edu
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
23 Jun 2000 
<br>
I downloaded Ploticus 1.38 source yesterday.  With one change (noted
below), it compiled and ran flawlessly.  Within about 30 minutes, I had
produced most of the kinds of graphs that I need.  Ploticus is excellent!
<br>
The one change concerns preliminaries.c.  On my Debian GNU/Linux systems,
there is no /usr/tmp.  Rather, /tmp is used because this is regularly
cleaned out.  Changing the first line of preliminaries.c worked for
me.  It might be useful to have this added to the Makefile:  when users
select their system, it also selects whether to use /usr/tmp or /tmp.
<br>
Thanks for writing it and making it (and the source) available.
<br>
Ian Neath neath@psych.purdue.edu
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
1 Jun 2000 
<br>
Hi Steve,
<br>
Just thought I'd let you know that ploticus compiles without
problems with DJGPP.  Unlike the cygwin version, there is no
issue with additional libraries (i.e., cygwin1.dll).  If you
wish I can send the binaries.
<br>
The only change required was altering the tmp directory to
c:/tmp.
<br>
Ken N. Seergobin ken@psych.utoronto.ca
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
30 May 2000 
<br>
Hello -
<br>
I've recently installed Ploticus, and I'm enjoying it very much.  I have a
question, however, about the location chosen for the temporary file.
<br>
I see in preliminaries.c that /usr/tmp is used.  I'm not sure, but I don't
think this adheres to the Unix (Linux?) Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.  Do
you know if this is the case?
<br>
I changed it on my system to use the /tmp directory.
<br>
- Jeff Mitchell
jbmitchell@SoftHome.net
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
09 May '00
<br>
Hi Steve,
<br> 
Don't want to take too much time out of your busy schedule.  Just
wanted to let you know that we are using your Plotics software to
generate a graph of usage of our dial-in modems in use on our
Portmaster.  
<br> 
We are just a small ISP and I was looking for a program that would
convert flat text files into graphs.  Ploticus works perfectly.  I've
had it in use just a few hours now, so it remains to be seen how stable
my setup is.  And I'm also not a programmer, but I play around with
script files once in a while.
<br> 
We are using v1.36 and have it installed under Linux.  In case you're
interested in seeing a live use by an ISP, you can take a look at:
<br> 
http://ns1.maineline.net/modemuse/howto.htm 
<br> 
for details about how I used the software.  The directory 'modemuse' is
browsable and contains the daily .gif files generated by Ploticus. 
Comments on use would be kindly accepted.
<br> 
Thanks for a great piece of software.
<br>
Steve Buza stevebuza@yahoo.com
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
09 May '00
<br> 
After spending the better part of my afternoon playing with Ploticus, I just 
wanted to drop you a note and tell you how great I think it is.  You've done 
outstanding work with it!
<br> 
Brian Fjeldstad  bfjeldstad@hotmail.com
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
18 Apr '00
<br>
Hi Steve,
<br> 
Great product!! Has helped in automating our messaging usage data
so we can stop using excel!
<br>
Kenneth Meehan  kenneth.meehan@bms.com
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
17 Apr '00
<br>
Nice program, but marketing isn't what it used to be.
<br> 
You need a poster emulating the old movie poster for
"Spartacus!" that shows a gladiator holding up a full
color graph with the caption:
<br> 
... "I am Ploticus!"
<br> 
Tracy M. Johnson  lucasvarity.com
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
31 Mar '00 
<br>
I really like this program.  It is well thought out and 
implemented.
<br> 
Thanks,
<br>
Robert Fish   rfish@mcqassociates.com
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
24 Mar 00 - Hi Steve,
<br>
per accident I heard of ploticus (from an HP employee reading Interact magazine,
HP-UX section) when I was asking the HP3000 (MPE operating system) newsgroup for
a tool like this on MPE ...
<br>
Well, I'm working on Unix as well and had a similiar problem (how to produce out
of data columns nice web based graphics readable by any kind of managers) and
thought: give it a try anyhow.
<br>
And I was deeply impressed ...
<br>
and alrady today (after 1.5 days work) I finished my work to create
automatically performance graphs out of HP MeasureWare for Web presentation on a
monthly basis ...
<br>
The ploticus is very simple I admit ... but it does exactly what I need. If
you're interested in I'd like to send you the .p file I use, a graph, and
probably the shell script I use to run this monthly via cron.
<br>
IT"S REALLY GREAT!
<br>
Now I'm looking for someone to port this to MPE as well ....
<br>
I'm really interested in getting any news etc., especially that I also
downloaded the web archive documentation. It is now part of our Intranet, mainly
to ease the work for me ...
<br>
Compliments: such a FREE powerful graphics S/W I've never seen before ...
<br>
Lets' stay in touch, best regards, 
<br>
Andreas Schmidt, CSC, Germany aschmid4@csc.com
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
10 Mar 00 - Greetings Steve: 
<br>
first off let me say I'm taking my first blow through your
plotting utility and am quite pleased with what I see thus far. I'm looking
to use it to automatically read in system performance data and generate
output my browser can read. I'm bumping into a problem though...
<br>
Hoehnke, Rick RHoehnke@talisman-energy.com
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
12 Mar 00 - Hi - 
<br> 
I saw the release of 1.35 and upgraded.  I am well on my way to setting
up a system to do a major technical report.  The largest part of the
report will be hundreds, possibly over a thousand plots.  
<br> 
Here is how I am setting up to do it.  I use SciLab to read the raw data
files, do filtering, computation, data manipulation, etc.  I write a
data file containing the fields for a plot.  Then I use the string
handling capabilities of SciLab to compose a bash command line string
for pl and then execute it with a system() call.  This gives me a .ps
file containing the plot complete with individual caption.
<br> 
I now have a LaTeX document started which places the .ps file in a
figure enviornment, rotates it to landscape, reduces it (as may be
required for various possible layouts).
<br> 
I already have scripts to run sets of raw data files through SciLab and
Ploticus.  My next step is to use these scripts to write the LaTeX
commands for each figure so that I can build the .tex file
automatically.
<br> 
My company, Industrial Analytics, is a 4 person outfit and we do not
have time to do this stuff manually, or even to point and click through
it.  I am so pleased to be able to put together a set of freely
available tools to automate the task.  Oh, I almost forgot to mention,
this all runs on a Linux box.  I borrowed the disk from a friend. 
Computer, monitor, printer: a little over $1000.00.
<br>
Ronald Michaels <michael@planetc.com>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
03 Mar 00 - Hello Steve,
<br> 
I have been playing around with some bar charts in Ploticus 1.34 - what a great 
piece of software. I can now help the kids with their homework a bit better 
<grin>.
<br> 
However, I have come across one problem...
<br>
Tom Garner peterg@teleord.co.uk
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
02 Mar 00 - Hi Steve,
<br> 
I am honored to be included in your 'rogues' gallery.  Ploticus is
still my favorite 'freshmeat' software and I have great fun
outdoing so called professional graphics products.  (Both in speed
and looks).
<br>
But I seem to have run into a little problem...
<br>
Scott Ostrander ostrande@berbee.com
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
28 Feb 00 - Hello Steve.
<br>
I distilled your PS manual to PDF as one file. I've enclosed it
in case you think other users would find it useful. I'm investigating use of
your package for securities analysis.
<br>
Michael S. Muegel
<br>
mike@muegel.org
 
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
20 Feb 00 - Hi Steve--
<br> 
First off, I can't begin to tell you how cool it is that you have made
ploticus available and shared the sources.
<br> 
In setting it up as part of our intranet (on a redhat 5.2 box), I came up
with this strategy for making a ploticus graphing server in perl with no
temporary files, piping data scripts to stdin and catching the gif output =
on stdout.
<br>
Tom McClure
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>

<hr>
22 Feb 00 - Steve,
<br> 
Thank you very much for your
prompt reply, and for even providing
me a working example !  (Clearly you
are a gentleman *and* a scholar ...)
<br> 
I feel I owe you at least a little more
in the way of my interest in Ploticus
given your considerate reply:
<br> 
Ploticus seems to me to be one of
the few animals that can properly
grok time series data; I used to use
the ISSCO Tell-A-Graf package on
an IBM mainframe in my "aerospace
engineer" days to handle data of this
type.
<br> 
I also have interest in the R language
(open source) technical computing
environment, which also shows some
promise for decent visualization and
analysis capabilities.  (This is a near
functional equivalent to the S or S-plus
language for statistics designed by Bell
Labs and/or sold through MathSoft.)
If you've had any experience with it, I'd
love to know your impression of it.
<br> 
My company is an energy procurement
consulting firm, and we deal with lots
of time series data relating to various
dynamic market pricing, as well as profiles of
customer energy consumption.  Our
need for visualization and presentation
tools is growing very rapidly.  (I only wish
Ploticus was available as a Win 9X port
so I could give it a spin prior to acquiring
Linux.)
<br> 
Thanks again for your reply; if you're ever
interested in working in the greater Buffalo, NY
area, I hope you'll drop me a note -- I'm sure
your talents could be put to strategic use here
at LepCorp!
<br> 
Regards,
<br> 
Mike Mastroianni  mjmalpha@localnet.com
<br>
<br>
<br>

<hr>
21 Feb 00 - Steve,
<br> 
If you have a moment, perhaps you
could answer a brief question re
your Ploticus package ?
<br> 
I've been looking for a good script-driven
scientific plotting package for a long
time w/ the ability to plot data where,
for example, the X-Y data are of the form:
<pre> 
10/12/2000 00:00,  22.57
10/12/2000 05:22. 19.64
10/13/2000 23:10, 17.98
</pre> 
Can Ploticus handle this in a properly-scaled
fashion ?
<br> 
If so, I will probably have to get Linux running
here on a workstation :)
Thanks in advance for any light you might
shed on my problem ...
<br> 
Mike Mastroianni  mjmalpha@localnet.com
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
17 Feb 00 - I've gotten ploticus to compile on the Cobalt Qube (the cool little MIPS
linux box with a glowing alien green light in the front). It didn't
compile right out of the box because of a few differences.
<br> 
1) No PNG libraries (hey, I was lazy and didn't need them anyway)
<br> 
2) No X11. At All. (these boxes don't have a keyboard or monitor)
<br> 
[...] Then I did a "make pl" because plpng wasn't happy without libpng. It
seems to work. Thought you might like to know.
<br> 
Dan DeMaggio  dmag@wellersoft.com
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
15 Feb 00 - Steve,
<br> 
    Ploticus is an excellent package.  I've been playing with it and it
is well above standard for
freeware packages.  I am using pl version 1.34 on Sun6.
<br>
James Walker
<br>
jwalker@wham.com
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
10 Feb 00 - Hi Steve.
<br> 
First, I'd like to thank you for writing ploticus. It's much more flexible
and easier to use than anything else I've seen. I love it, and I'm
thinking of distributing it with a web-based medical program I've written
(with appropriate credit, of course!) I also appreciate the excellent
handbook and all those examples.
<br> 
P.S.-
I would love to have more 'auto' features, since I generate the plots
on-the-fly. For example, I'm generating a history graph (X=3Ddate, =
Y=3DDose).
Sometimes I'm graphing a few days, some times it's over a few years.=20
Currently, I have a perl program decide if the label should be 'Mmm' (if
I'm graphing less than 1 year) or the month label should only be 'M' (for
more than a year). I know, I know, adding heuristics to your program to
"do the right thing" is hard. But I can ask, can't I? :)  By The way, the
autoyear function is great. Heck, the whole program is great.
<br> 
Dan DeMaggio  dmag@wellersoft.com
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
10 Feb 00 - 
Can I convert the Ploticus Programm to a windos platform?
Or did you know something about a Programm like Ploticus
running under Windows (I already run GNUPLOT but it doesn't
do what I want)?
<br> 
Thanks a lot
<br>
Andreas    Andreas.Dangel@AQUA-Institut.de
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
9 Feb 00 -  
Greetings Steve!
<br> 
My name is Garry Bryan and I'm a contract System Administrator currently on assignment with a large
manufacturer in the southeastern U.S. . Several months ago I was tasked ( okay, it was more like blu
dgeoned) to automate system performance reporting using "free" software for the group of Unix ( HPUX
) boxes I am involved with at their site.
<br> 
After fumbling around for a while, I found Ploticus. I am currently putting the finishing touches on
 the whole process producing the charts for monthend and I'm pleased to say that everything is going
 well( Am I long-winded or what?).
<br> 
Thanks for your time and for a great piece of software!
<br> 
Garry G. Bryan  cradh@ix.netcom.com
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
8 Feb 00 - Hi Steve -
<br> 
I found Ploticus about a month ago, just as an accident.  It filled a
need which I had.  I am now using Ploticus from within Scilab as the
engine to print out data plots.  I get very nice looking plots with more
control than the native plotter in Scilab.  I now drink coffee while my
computer slaves away on a shell script.
<br> 
It took me about 4 hours on a Saturday (cold and wet outside) to get
just what I wanted.  Thanks very much for taking the time to make your
hard work available.
<br> 
Ronald Michaels  michael@planetc.com
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
8 Feb 00 - God bless sourcecode, without it I would never have thought about
trying smaller farouts :) It would benefit from some additional
comments though ;)
<br>
Robert Linden robert.linden@postcom.deutschepost.de
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
8 Feb 00 - Greetings SG.
<br> 
I have just downloaded the ploticus source, built and installed,
and am perusing the html doco with a goofy grin on my face.
<br> 
After 20 years in the biz I have suffered through more plot
packages than you can shake a stick at, and at first glance
ploticus looks like very high-quality work.  The sample
plots conform to my own philosophy (influenced by Tufte):
cut the BS, icing, or Disney factor (whatever you like to
call it), and just present the data cleanly and simply.
<br> 
I have an immediate need for plot-to-PNG via cgi (not Perl,
Tcl -- relatively unsung for cgi scripting but quite ideal).
Ploticus looks like just the right toolkit for the job.
<br> 
I'm tremendously impressed by the quality of your online doco,
cleanliness of build (even without gnu configure), and the
quality & quantity of the examples.
<br> 
Applications here are many and varied, ranging from the
web-based presentation of slitmask designs to (a private
for-fun project) the presentation of local transit district
routes and bus stops via instant customized maps... I foresee
great fun with ploticus -- if we do anything particularly
amusing with it, I'll drop you a line.
<br> 
thanks for so many hundreds of hours of thoughtful and
meticulous work.  much appreciated.
<br> 
De Clarke de@ucolick.org
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
30 Jan 00 - Steve,
<br> 
I'm playing with your wonderful program and most things I tried
work fine. But I live in Russia and would like to plot
time data which are in Russian. I did obvious changes in dates.c
and modified stock.csv but without success - running
pl -x11 stock.html produces errors...
<br>
Oleg Bartunov  oleg@sai.msu.su
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
19 Jan 00 - Hello Steve,
<br> 
I've been using ploticus off and on for about 2 months now.
Typically plotting statistical data from our ADSM backup
accounting log.  We are using this to trend growth and plan
expansion.  Recently some client or clients are out of
control and using too much space.  I would like to
graphically display the data..
<br>
O, in case you are interested, RedHat 6.1 and I typically
build a ploticus "template" file and then use a ksh script
to modify the template and drive the output.
<br> 
Thanks for a great application!
<br>
Scott Ostrander ostrande@berbee.com
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
21 Jan 00 - Hi!
<br> 
ploticus is great software!
<br>
Pablo Marques PMarques@herald.com
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
15 Jan 00 - I am thinking about using ploticus as an alternative to gnuplot.  I like
the flexibility in using colors and linestyles in ploticus.  
<br> 
Wenshui gan  wgan@alumni.caltech.edu
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
11 Jan 00 - 
FYI, I found ploticus at linuxberg, where I was looking for a
non-interactive
graph-package to be used for statistics-display on the web. I'm at the
moment
trying to estimate if it does our job, and it seems it does, it looks
very powerful.
<br> 
Robert Linden robert.linden@postcom.deutschepost.de
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
28 Dec 99 - I downloaded Ploticus 1.31 and have run into a problem with autoscale.  I
think I've found a solution, and wanted to let you know about it [..]
If I'm missing something and this isn't a bug, please let me know!
Otherwise, I hope this helps to improve your product, which looks like it
should be really nice!
<p>
P.S. In case you're curious, I'm trying to see if Ploticus would be a good
replacement for Gnuplot in some of our data analysis scripts (eg: to
monitor web hits, etc).  It seems to be a lot more flexible than gnuplot,
but also requires a lot more hard-coded controls -- in other words, in
Gnuplot I can get a pretty graph with almost no work at all: "plot
'datafile' using 1:2 with lines" will get me a nice graph with a legend,
autoscaled axes, etc.  In ploticus, I need 15-20 lines of scriptfile to
accomplish the same thing (creating axes, legend, setting scales, reading
data, etc).  Do you think in the future Ploticus might have a "sensible
defaults" kind of mode, where it can figure these things out for itself?
Or is that not really the Ploticus' purpose in life?
<p> 
In any case, thanks for developing it and making it available!
<br>
Michael Fischer mfischer@aol.net
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
22 Dec 99 - I read through your license agreement.  Would it be acceptable if I were to
make modifications which I submitted to you to be added to your software?
I don't plan on modifying the code, just curious if it would be "legal".
<br> 
Jeff Richards  Jeff_Richards@shawinc.com
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
7 Dec 99 - First of all, thanks for creating ploticus. I've been using it for quite some
time now, and I really appreciate it.
<br>
Mark Smeets
<br>
msmeets@pcl-hage.nl
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
3 Dec 99 - 
I downloaded your Ploticus 1.31 software for linux some days ago. First,
it's really a great peace of software, this is what I was searching for
for a long time, thank you for giving it away for free! 
<br> 
Andreas Widmann widmann@rz.uni-leipzig.de
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
1 Dec 99 - I have used the combination of grap -> gpic -> groff to do my
graphs, but that combination does not support colors and is
missing features like having the x axis as dates or time. I have
had to convert dates to a linear time and have different labels
and x axis units. That is always a pain when the months are of
different lengths. Ploticus seems to fit my needs perfectly.
<br> 
Goran Larsson      hoh@approve.se
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
1 Dec 99 - Hello.  I just downloaded ploticus 1.3 to try it out.
The program is very well documented and the HTML version of
the manual is very easy to navigate around in. I did find
some minor problems [...].
<br>
Goran Larsson hoh@approve.se
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
19 Nov 99 - I've compiled Ploticus Version 1.31 with png on my AIX 3.2.5 machine.
If you want the binaries I can send them.
I'll try with HP-UX soon, if there is any interest.
<br> 
And, well, it's good!
<br> 
Thanks,
<br> 
luciano mannucci luke@nameron.smd.sublink.org
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
17 Nov 99 - I'd be very glad to maintain a complete (unmodified) mirror
of your Ploticus here at the Univ. of Technology Vienna,
Austria, Central EU.
So I'd kindy request your permission.
<br> 
I believe it would be very much appreciated by
the clients here in Austrian Academic Area to have
such a useful tool available locally.
<br>
Antonin Sprinzl Antonin.Sprinzl@tuwien.ac.at
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
16 Nov 99 - Ploticus seems nice.  It is a little low-level, and could
benefit from a layer on top of it to more automagically create
output types.
<br>
Michael D. Beynon              Department of Computer Science
<br>
beynon@cs.umd.edu  
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
6 Nov 99 - I used  ploticus to  do  a pie  chart for  an
academic  paper which  has now  been submitted.   Im working  on other
stuff  at the moment,  including xfig  whose author  I have  also been
corresponding with.  I currently see  a need for a graphics package in
which users can draw images and  enter usable meta data on the images.
For instance,  a person could draw  a map of roads  and then associate
data about  those roads, like the  grade, speed limit,  etc.  The same
could be true of architectural drawings, etc.
<br>
marc
<br>
bumble@dclink.com
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
29 Oct 99 -
thank you for providing your very useful ploticus package!
<p>
Dr. Dirk Melcher
<br>
Dirk.Melcher@usf.Uni-Osnabrueck.DE
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
30 Sept 99 -
I liked IPL and I like Ploticus even better.
<p>
Jim Arnott
<br>
jarnott@bridge.com
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
25 Sept 99 -
Congratulations on writing ploticus and thanks for sharing it with us.
Your program is really cool. Until now I was doing this kind of stuff
with gnuplot and/or Chart-0.99 (with perl).  Doing it with ploticus makes the
charts come out really faster.
<br> 
Sotiris Vassilopoulos
BetaTech, Inc. - Athens, Hellas
<br>
svas@mail.ariadne-t.gr
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
25 Sept 1999 -
Some feedback (no flames intended).
<p> 
I took a look at your package, and I liked it.
However, the license is too strict for me, especially the following clause:
``Permission is granted to MODIFY the SOURCE CODE, however,
        modified code may not be distributed to others*.''
<p>
In my opinion, this leaves open the possibility that, sooner or later,
you decide to make the code proprietary, after which all contributors loose
their efforts. Therefore, I will not use ploticus, and certainly not
contribute to it. But I do respect your standpoint.
<p> 
Best regards,
<p> 
Herman Bruyninckx
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
23 Sep 1999 -
I  am now  attempting  to use  the  ploticus package  for plotting  my
academic research  pie charts.   Thanks alot for  pointing it  out. I'm
installing it on my Linux box at home.  [...]
<p> 
I haven't successfully  finished with it yet so I don't  know if it will
work.  The Perl5  Charting package created pie charts  with the labels
smashed  one on  top of  the  other.  I  think your  package with  its
stand-offs will  be much  more successful.  Thanks  again.  I  very much
appreciate it.  It looks like a great package.
<br>
marc
<br>
bumble@cse.psu.edu
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
21 Sept 1999 - 
Haven't tried it yet but certainly will
the samples gallery looks awesome
would appreciate infor on updates etc to 
<br>
paehler@gol.com


<br>
<br>
</td></tr>
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<a href="Welcome.html">
<img src="../doc/ploticus.gif" border=0></a><br><small>data display engine &nbsp; <br>
<a href="../doc/Copyright.html">Copyright Steve Grubb</a>
<br>
<br>
<center>
<img src="../gallery/all.gif">
</center>
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