PGPLOT is a device-independent graphics subroutine library written starting in 1983 by Tim Pearson, a professor at the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes ...

. PGPLOT is written mostly in FORTRAN with a modular output API that allows output to several dozen types of plotting device. PGPLOT has been widely used in the academic and scientific communities, because it provides both low-level (glyph, point, line, and area) plotting primitives and also high-level facilities for drawing

graphs Graph may refer to: Mathematics *Graph (discrete mathematics), a structure made of vertices and edges **Graph theory, the study of such graphs and their properties * Graph (topology), a topological space resembling a graph in the sense of discre ...

. PGPLOT may be redistributed to third parties and modified, but only in binary form. Neither the original nor modified source code are allowed to be redistributed. The most recent version of PGPLOT is 5.2.2, released in February 2001, although third parties have written

unofficial patch An unofficial patch, sometimes alternatively called a community patch, is a patch for a piece of software, created by a third party such as a user community without the involvement of the original developer. Similar to an ordinary patch, it alle ...

es that include support for additional devices, 64 bit systems, and RGB (true color) plotting. PGPLOT provides C and Fortran 77 interface. There are also several user-contributed bindings, such as C++,

perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

, python,

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and

tcl/tk Tk is a cross-platform widget toolkit that provides a library of basic elements of GUI widgets for building a graphical user interface (GUI) in many programming languages. It is free and open-source software released under a BSD-style software l ...

. PGPLOT includes device-independent output to many devices including several types of image file, graphics display terminals and plotters,

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language and dynamically typed, stack-based programming language. It is most commonly used in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm, but as a Turing complete programming language, it c ...

devices, and

X Window The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been a ...

. Interactive devices can be used to deliver numeric parameters to the controlling program via a graphics cursor. It is known to run on many operating systems, including most

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix or *NIX) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Uni ...

systems,

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, and

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. In part because of its age, PGPLOT has several limitations compared to newer packages such as

PLplot PLplot is a library of subroutines that are often used to make scientific plots in compiled languages such as C, C++, D, Fortran, Ada, OCaml and Java. The library also exists as an unofficial binding for the .NET runtime. ''PLplot'' can als ...

. In particular, PGPLOT supports only 8-bit indexed color graphics, and not full

RGB The RGB color model is an additive color model in which the red, green, and blue primary colors of light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colors. The name of the model comes from the initials of the three ...

color; and there is no clean way to render graphics directly to an array in program memory. The library PG2PLplot has been developed to aid the transition from PGPlot to PLplot in Fortran programs.

References

External links

PGPLOT home page at Caltech
Graphics libraries {{Compu-graphics-stub