| Original author(s) | Robert Maier, Nick Tufillaro |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | GNU Project |
| Stable release | 2.6 / September 27, 2009 |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| License | GNU General Public License |
| Website | gnu |
GNU plotutils is a set of free software command-line tools and software libraries for generating 2D plot graphics based on data sets. It is used in projects such as PSPP and UMLgraph, and in many areas of academic research, [1] [2] [3] and is included in many Linux distributions such as Debian. [4] Windows and Mac OS X versions are also available. The library provides bindings for the C and C++ languages. Its stand-alone command-line tools can generate graphs and perform numerical calculation of spline curves and systems of ordinary differential equations. Plotutils is a GNU package and is distributed under a free software licence, the GPL.
Several utilities were inspired by Unix plotting utilities. A graph utility and various plot filters were present in the first releases of Unix from Bell Laboratories. By the time of Version 7 Unix, graph, plot, spline, and several device-dependent versions of libplot were standard Unix features. The first display device supported by the package was a Tektronix 611 storage scope. By the early 1980s, numerous other devices were supported.
In 1989, the first GNU versions of graph, plot, tek2plot, spline and their respective documentation were written. Richard Stallman further directed development of the programs and documentation. The distribution, as it stood in 1991, was distributed under the name GNU graphics.
In 1995, the package was significantly expanded by writing a device-independent, standalone version of libplot, and by rewriting graph from scratch, turning it into a real-time filter.
troff, short for "typesetter roff", is the major component of a document processing system developed by Bell Labs for the Unix operating system. troff and the related nroff were both developed from the original roff.
gnuplot is a command-line and GUI program that can generate two- and three-dimensional plots of functions, data, and data fits. The program runs on all major computers and operating systems . Originally released in 1986, its listed authors are Thomas Williams, Colin Kelley, Russell Lang, Dave Kotz, John Campbell, Gershon Elber, Alexander Woo "and many others." Despite its name, this software is not part of the GNU Project.
deb is the format, as well as filename extension of the software package format for the Debian Linux distribution and its derivatives.
The archiver, also known simply as ar, is a Unix utility that maintains groups of files as a single archive file. Today, ar is generally used only to create and update static library files that the link editor or linker uses and for generating .deb packages for the Debian family; it can be used to create archives for any purpose, but has been largely replaced by tar for purposes other than static libraries. An implementation of ar is included as one of the GNU Binutils.
IRAF is a collection of software written at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) geared towards the reduction of astronomical images and spectra in pixel array form. This is primarily data taken from imaging array detectors such as CCDs. It is available for all major operating systems for mainframes and desktop computers. IRAF was designed cross-platform, supporting VMS and UNIX-like operating systems. Use on Microsoft Windows was made possible by Cygwin in earlier versions, and can be today done with the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Today, it is primarily used on macOS and Linux.
dd is a command-line utility for Unix, Plan 9, Inferno, and Unix-like operating systems and beyond, the primary purpose of which is to convert and copy files. On Unix, device drivers for hardware and special device files appear in the file system just like normal files; dd can also read and/or write from/to these files, provided that function is implemented in their respective driver. As a result, dd can be used for tasks such as backing up the boot sector of a hard drive, and obtaining a fixed amount of random data. The dd program can also perform conversions on the data as it is copied, including byte order swapping and conversion to and from the ASCII and EBCDIC text encodings.
The GNU Scientific Library is a software library for numerical computations in applied mathematics and science. The GSL is written in C; wrappers are available for other programming languages. The GSL is part of the GNU Project and is distributed under the GNU General Public License.
Ted is a lightweight free software word processor for the X Window System, and runs on Linux and other Unix-like systems. Developed primarily by Mark de Does, it's licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL-2.0-only), and has been translated into several languages.
The GNU Data Language (GDL) is a free alternative to IDL, achieving full compatibility with IDL 7 and partial compatibility with IDL 8. Together with its library routines, GDL is developed to serve as a tool for data analysis and visualization in such disciplines as astronomy, geosciences, and medical imaging. GDL is licensed under the GPL. Other open-source numerical data analysis tools similar to GDL include Julia, Jupyter Notebook, GNU Octave, NCAR Command Language (NCL), Perl Data Language (PDL), R, Scilab, SciPy, and Yorick.
Mathomatic is a free, portable, general-purpose computer algebra system (CAS) that can symbolically solve, simplify, combine, and compare algebraic equations, and can perform complex number, modular, and polynomial arithmetic, along with standard arithmetic. It does some symbolic calculus (derivative, extrema, Taylor series, and polynomial integration and Laplace transforms), numerical integration, and handles all elementary algebra except logarithms. Trigonometric functions can be entered and manipulated using complex exponentials, with the GNU m4 preprocessor. Not currently implemented are general functions like f(x), arbitrary-precision and interval arithmetic, and matrices.
SpareMiNT is a software distribution based on FreeMiNT, which consists of a MiNT-like operating system (OS) and kernel plus GEM compatible AES.
Euler is a free and open-source numerical software package. It contains a matrix language, a graphical notebook style interface, and a plot window. Euler is designed for higher level math such as calculus, optimization, and statistics.
Graphics Layout Engine (GLE) is a graphics scripting language designed for creating publication quality graphs, plots, diagrams, figures and slides. GLE supports various graph types such as function plots, histograms, bar graphs, scatter plots, contour lines, color maps and surface plots through a simple but flexible set of graphing commands. More complex output can be created by relying on GLE's scripting language, which is full featured with subroutines, variables, and logic control. GLE relies on LaTeX for text output and supports mathematical formula in graphs and figures. GLE's output formats include EPS, PS, PDF, JPEG, and PNG.
Unix is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.
XZ Utils is a set of free software command-line lossless data compressors, including the programs lzma and xz, for Unix-like operating systems and, from version 5.0 onwards, Microsoft Windows. For compression/decompression the Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm (LZMA) is used. XZ Utils started as a Unix port of Igor Pavlov's LZMA-SDK that has been adapted to fit seamlessly into Unix environments and their usual structure and behavior.
In Unix, graph is a command-line utility used to draw plots from tabular data.
