Plotc User's Manual
Charles E. Towne · 2005
Plotc is a two-dimensional plotting program that allows the user to create various plots without becoming an expert in the use of, or even knowing about, the baseline graphics routines. Plots can be created consisting of multiple curves and/or sets of symbols. The curves can be plotted as solid lines, lines with symbols (vector-symbol plots), or in a sequence consisting of different line types (solid, dashed, dot-dashed, etc.) An option is provided to allow a multiple curve plot with each curve offset in the x-direction by some user-specified increment. Plots can be created with or without axes, labels, and legends. Axes can be either standard or logarithmic. The scaling of the axes can be done automatically, or specified by the user. Colors may be specified for all elements of the plot. A special-case version of plotc, called plotc p3d, can be used to create two-dimensional line plots from the xyz and q files created by many computational fluid dynamics codes for use with the three-dimensional plotting program Plot3d. Plotc is written in Fortran 90, and is normally run on a Linux workstation. The plot may be displayed on the graphics monitor using OpenGL graphics routines, and a PostScript file is created that may be printed on a PostScript printer or viewed with a PostScript previewer. The OpenGL and PostScript plots are created separately; i.e., the PostScript plot is not merely a screen capture of the OpenGL plot. The OpenGL plot is intended as a “preview”. The PostScript plot allows a wider variety of fonts to be used, with subscripts/superscripts, special symbols, etc.