Creating informative graphs with plotutils

On Axis

The axes and their labels are important plotting elements, and several options control them. The -E option can make Graph draw the axes on the right or top instead of the usual left and bottom. Using -N <axis> , you can deactivate the usual ticks and their labels for the X or Y axis. In this case, or later, you can relabel each axis with the -X <label> and -Y <label> options (Figure 7).

Figure 7: You can easily activate and deactivate axis labels.

By default, Graph adds ticks to each axis relative to its origin. Using the -x or -y option, you can be more specific about tick spacing along the axis with the arguments lower_limit , upper_limit , and spacing . If a value is missing or you enter a minus sign, Graph automatically calculates the values from the data. The additional -R <axis> argument tells Graph to round the values to the nearest integer.

More Room

Among Graph's special features is its ability to scale an axis logarithmically. You do this with the -l <axis> option, and you can also add a background grid to help orientation (Figure 8).

Figure 8: Logarithmic scales and grids help represent data.

If the display size isn't big enough, you can use the --bitmap-size option to set a new size. The option takes the <width>x<height> pixels syntax. You can also set the fonts with the -F option and their size with -f . Graph expects a relative value for the size, such as -f .01 , based on the minimum dimension of the plotting box.