plot
The GNU plot filter plot displays GNU graphics metafiles or
translates them to other formats. It will take input from files
specified on the command line or from standard input. The `-T'
option is used to specify the desired output format. Supported output
formats include "X", "pnm", "gif", "ai", "ps", "fig", "pcl", "hpgl",
"tek", and "meta" (the default).
The metafile format is a device-independent format for storage of vector
graphics. By default, it is a binary rather than a human-readable
format (see section The Graphics Metafile Format). Each of the graph, pic2plot,
tek2plot, and plotfont utilities will write a graphics
metafile to standard output if no `-T' option is specified on its
command line. The libplot graphics library may also be used to
produce metafiles. Metafiles may contain arbitrarily many pages of
graphics, but each metafile produced by graph contains only a
single page.
plot, like the metafile format itself, is useful if you wish to
preserve a vector graphics file, and display or edit it with more than
one drawing editor. The following example shows how you may do this.
To produce a plot of data arranged as alternating x and y
coordinates in an ASCII file, you may use graph as follows:
graph < ascii_data_file > test.meta
The file `test.meta' will be a single-page graphics metafile. Similarly, to create in metafile format a plot consisting of a simple figure, you may do:
echo 0 0 1 1 2 0 | spline | graph > test.meta
To display any such plot on an X Window System display, you would do
plot -T X test.meta
or
plot -T X < test.meta
To print the plot on a Postscript printer, you would do something like
plot -T ps < test.meta | lpr
To edit it with the free idraw drawing editor, you would do
plot -T ps < test.meta > test.ps idraw test.ps
To produce a "portable anymap" (a file in PBM, PGM, or PPM format, whichever is most appropriate) you would do
plot -T pnm < test.meta > test.pnm
and to produce a pseudo-GIF file, you would do
plot -T gif < test.meta > test.gif
Similarly, to produce a version of the plot that can be edited with Adobe Illustrator, you would do
plot -T ai < test.meta > test.ai
and to produce a version that can be edited with the free xfig
drawing editor, you would do
plot -T fig < test.meta > test.fig xfig test.fig
Other formats may be obtained by using plot -T pcl, plot -T
hpgl, and plot -T tek.
plot may behave differently depending on the environment in which
it is invoked. In particular, plot -T ai, plot -T ps,
plot -T fig, plot -T pcl, and plot -T hpgl are
affected by the environment variable PAGESIZE. plot -T
X, plot -T pnm, and plot -T gif are affected by the
environment variable BITMAPSIZE. The DISPLAY environment
variable affects the operation of plot -T X, and the
TERM environment variable affects the operation of plot -T
tek. There are also several environment variables that affect the
operation of plot -T pcl and plot -T hpgl. For a complete
discussion of the effects of the environment on plot, see
section Environment variables.
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