Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Announcing version 0.5 of ctioga2

I've just released version 0.5 of ctioga2, my plotting program. While there is still quite a lot of improvements I'd like to get in some day, the past few days have seen a lot of activity. Probably the most important change is the new space-separated command file format, much simpler than the old one (which is still supported, although marked clearly as deprecated now). Another important change for the users is the large improvement of error reporting: in most cases, ctioga2 pinpoints the exact location where things go wrong; it also features reporting on LaTeX errors. The last important feature is also the introduction of real contour plots, such as the one below, coming from the documentation:

Now, I feel like ctioga2 is coming close to gnuplot in terms of features and ease of use. Part of my plans for the website is to create a gnuplot mockup gallery, in which I would take as many examples from the gnuplot website as possible (ie all the ones ctioga2 can reproduce) and compare the code and look of both.

Among features I'd like to implement for ctioga2, here are the ones that I think are the most important ones:

  • plot styles (histograms, bars, impulses), in the spirit of the plot with instruction of gnuplot
  • complex axes: broken axes and linked axes
  • full control of the tick labels and positions (alternative formats, placing ticks at multiples of π, and labelling them as such...)
  • full styling using CSS-like stylesheets
  • a windows port would be nice, too

But maybe you have other ideas you'd like to see before that ?

2 comments:

Benjamin Kerensa said...

I'm excited to learn about this program and hope to tinker with it soon.

Vincent Fourmond said...

Please let me know what you think about it (and especially what bother you) !

Development is going on fast those days, as I'm trying to integrate many features available in gnuplot but not yet in ctioga2