RE: Re: Plotting library for GTK+

[Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu>]

On Tue, 2 Dec 2014, Sergei Naumov wrote:

> > > I think this question was asked many times but googling gives a rather 
> > patchy
> > > answer to it. So, I am writing a piece of C code that acquires some data 
> > from
> > > hardware controllers and it also has to plot a few simple graphs and > 
> > histograms
> > > out of them. What is a "canonical" tool for such a purpose?
> > >
> > > I played a bit with GtkExtra but it seems that the project is somewhat > 
> > forgotten
> > > and it does not have all the documentation in it. I also looked at Cairo 
> > but > it
> > > is a low level library so I would have to implement all the scaling, 
> > axes, > ticks
> > > and stuff myself. There are some interactive tools based on GTK but I 
> > need a
> > > library, as I have to build in plotting functionality.
> >
> > AFAIK there's no such library, unfortunately. However gnuplot is perhaps 
> > the nearest thing to a "canonical" open-source plotting program. It can be 
> > run quite effectively in "slave" mode and can produce a wide variety of 
> > output formats (notably, using cairo and pango).
>
> Gnuplot would be the best but it is an interactive program. It can also 
> produce all kinds of file formats. Are you suggesting to create such files 
> and display them in GTK application?

Yes, it's not the ideal solution (using a library would be cleaner) 
but it works quite nicely. You can generate a plot in batch mode using 
gnuplot's pngcairo "terminal" and load the PNG into a GTK window.

Allin Cottrell