Hi all,

Does anyone have a piece of software with which it is possible to create a vector plot based on tabulated data like:

x-coordinate, y-coordinate, angle, vector length.

An internet reference will do too.

Gert-Jan van der Gulik

There are certainly good graphic packages to do that. The one I am using is not the best, but you can try. It is known as PGPLOT, and it works in FORTRAN. So you need to link your object files to the relevant library and you need some Reference manual. If you are in a University, they certainly have that, otherwise you can try to contact the 'author':

Professor Tim Pearson, in CalTech, at

tjp@deimos.caltech.edu

A Linux program PLOTMTV exists. It is part of the SUSE Linux 6.1 Distribution (I guess it's also included in 6.2). The web resources I don't know. The formating capabilities aren't too impressive when I remember right.

For Windows >3.11 exists a (commercial) spreadsheet-type programm: "Harvard ChartXL", which handles a lot of different plot-types. It includes also 2D and 3D Vector plots. For example: 2D data files must have 5 column format 1.x-coordinates,2.y-coordinates,3. x-values,4,y-values,5. magnitudes. The vector plot can be reformated (colored vectores, linear length, log-length with respect to the magnitude etc.). But there exists a limitation which I had not evaluate in detail until yet: it displays only a limited number of vectors (approx. 1000-2000). But this should be enough. An educational version is available which was less than 300 DM (approx. $170 US) when I bought it in 96.

Try these two commerical software (1) ORIGIN v5.0/6.0 (2) Mathmatics