Ploticus data display engine Copyright Steve Grubb


prefabricated plot templates


Available prefabs:
scat1 - 2-D scatterplot

prefabs

SYNOPSIS

pl -pre prefabname other pl options

DESCRIPTION

This page describes prefabs (prefabricated plot templates) which simplify and quicken the production of commonly rendered plots. Prefabs are new in ploticus version 1.40 and are probably the easiest way to use the ploticus package.

With prefabs one can avoid creating or editing ploticus scripts for many common styles of plots, at the expense of some flexibility. The user invokes the -pre command line option and supplies several key parameters on the command line as var=value pairs and/or within the data file.

For example: pl -pre scat1 -png datafile=results.dat x=2 y=4

The various prefabs are stored as ordinary ploticus scripts in a ./prefabs directory pointed to by the PLOTICUS_PREFABS environment variable. Normally this is in the directory where ploticus is installed, but it could also be a user's directory of customized prefab scripts.

This manual page describes all of the available prefabs, and the parameters to be supplied by the user.

PARAMETERS

Parameters may be supplied on the pl command line as var=value pairs as seen in the above example.

They may also be embedded in an input data file, using the #set construct:

#set x = 2
#set y = 3
#set title = Correlation of WBC vs. T-Chol

Either method will implicitly #declare the variable.

OUTPUT FILE NAMES

Output file naming is similar to that of pl in other contexts. For the above example the output file would be named scat1.png. The -o option may be used to specify output file name explicitly.

CUSTOMIZATION

If it is desired to customize a plot beyond the scope of a prefab (to change colors, sizes, styles etc.) one may copy the relevant file from the ./prefabs directory and modify it to suit. Users are also free to add new .pl files to the ./prefabs directory to suit their needs. Prefab scripts are accessed using pl -pre name where name is the script name without the .pl extension.

NOTES

Any of the pl command line options may be used with prefabs. In particular, the -scale option may be useful.




AVAILABLE PREFABS:



SCAT1

Produces a 2-D scatterplot with optional point labeling, correlation, and regression line.

The first example above was produced using this command:

	pl  -gif  -pre scat1  datafile=data1  x=2  y=3  
The second was produced using this command:
	pl  -gif  -pre scat1  datafile=data1  x=2  y=3  id=1 \
	xlbl="Total Ch"  ylbl="White Blood Cell Count"  correlate=yes  
We used the additional command line options -scale 0.7 -tightcrop. You can try it yourself (the data file is in the directory $PLOTICUS_PREFABS).

Required parameters:

datafile - the name of the user's data file, or stdin

x - the field holding values in X

y - the field holding values in Y

Optional parameters:

title - plot title to be centered at top

id - a field holding an identifier

xlbl - a text label for the X axis

ylbl - a text label for the Y axis

correlate - if specified (yes), correlation and regression will be done


Markup created by unroff 1.0,    January 15, 2001.