In article <3300945A.15FB7483 at t10.lanl.gov>, Carla Kuiken <kuiken at t10.lanl.gov> writes:
>I'm trying to produce a scatter plot with a few labeled values (like
>years) on the X axis, and a lot of numerical values on the Y axis. Many
>of the points have the same X and Y coordinates. I'm looking for
>software that can plot these next to, instead of on top of, each other.
>I have an ancient DOS program called FigP that used to do this, but it's
>given up the ghost. Unix, mac or PC are OK, although I prefer PC
>software. It doesn't have to be free either. Thanks for any suggestions.
I've recently grown fond of "GLE". It is a bit of an odd hybrid, where you
write scripts to describe what/how to graph in an interactive editor, and
then hit a button to see the current state of your graph. After a bunch
of edit/graph cycles you end up with a graph the way you want it to be. I
had to do some work on it to get it to build cleanly on OpenVMS/Alpha, but
it appears that it should build ok on Linux and on PCs (judging from the
#ifdef's.) Anyway, it gives a lot more control than I could ever manage
with Gnuplot.
As for your "data on top of each other" problem, well, that's a tough one.
I would be kind of tempted to preprocess the data, sorting by X,Y, then
have some little script convert:
1,1
1,1
1,1
to
1,1,3
At that point you could do something like have the program use (1,1) for
the coordinate, and "3" for the size of the dot, or something similar to
that. Or you could have your script dither the data slightly, to, for
instance:
1,1
1,1.1
1,1.2
Good luck,
David Mathog
mathog at seqaxp.bio.caltech.edu
Manager, sequence analysis facility, biology division, Caltech
