Sunday, October 26, 2003

Gnuplot and my weight-loss plan

Alright.. so I dug up my old gnuplot scripts from my thesis work and started a plot of weight versus time (days). After staring at the script I wrote to plot the research data, I realized I've forgotten a lot of the stuff about gnuplot so I had to refer to the manual a bit. I also found a wiki dedicated to gnuplot at gnuplot wiki.

I thought it might be a good time to try SVG, especially cool for a graph that I can resize nicely! Turns out there is an "output plugin" for gnuplot that I can use to get my plot in SVG format. That's alright, no problem. However, I think on linux there is a little problem getting a decent viewer for SVG files. Interestingly, there are some nice folks working on SVG display capabilities for the Mozilla browser. However, it seems that while the SVG code is in the Mozilla CVS it's not turned on in the trunk Mozilla/Mozilla-firebird. Doh. I don't want to recompile mine on my linux box. :( Anyways, this page lists a lot of other available SVG viewer implementations out there. I am using Adobe's right now, but can't say I am too impressed with it as a plug-in for Firebird. Out of that list, I am most eagerly awaiting KSVG, which will be part of KDE 3.2, supposedly scheduled for a December 2003 release. How cool is that?! :) Also cool is Squiggle, the SVG browser that is part of the Batik package -- only thing is that I need java on my linux box.

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