A flexible electronic graph paper

GRAFFER is an X-Y plot generating package written in IDL. It needs a workstation or terminal supporting IDL widgets and at least version 4.0 of IDL.

The approach of GRAFFER is an essentially pragmatic one. It aimed to fill the gap between the kind of simple plots that are trivial to do in IDL just by using the plotting procedures from the IDL> prompt and the sort of complex and specialised plots where it's worthwhile to write a specific program. The other boundaries of its domain are figure-drawing packages such as xfig and, of course, the oldest of all methods of drawing graphs: graph paper. The nearest equivalent that I am aware of is ACE/gr which is a Motif or Athena-based utility for graph drawing.

A Brief List of Facilities

• Plot multiple traces (up to 32767) on a single set of axes.
• Plot almost any IDL expression as a function.
• Fitting to datasets.
• Wide choice of plotting styles.
• Wide choice of axis styles.
• Interactive setting of axis and plotting options.
• "Free" annotation as well as standard IDL labelling.
• Controllable automated key generation.
• Online help system.
• Save plot and return to it later.
  • Efficient binary format for local storage.
  • Ascii mode for transfer between platforms.
• PostScript output, including encapsulated.
• GRAFF_ADD routine allows automated addition of datasets.
• Limited support for 2-Dimensional data and functions.

Copyright, Support & Warranty

Usage:

GRAFFER and its component routines may be freely used, copied & distributed but please:

1. Don't claim you wrote it.
2. If you change it make it clear which bit you've changed and don't say I made the changes.
3. Let me know of your improvements, and I'll consider putting them into future releases (credited of course).

Warranty:

NONE - You didn't pay any money so you take your chance.

• If it's useful: GOOD.
• If it isn't you got what you paid for.

Maintenance:

I'll try to fix bugs.

Updates:

As I really only work on GRAFFER while waiting for data to load or process, I can't undertake to add new features. However if you think of something let me know and I'll try to do it if I can see a way of implementing it without too much disruption.