OakPlot

OakPlot User Manual

The OakPlot user manual is split into the following sections:

1. Introduction - A brief introduction to using OakPlot
2. Commands - A reference guide to the commands available
3. File Formats - The data file format used by OakPlot
4. String Formats - The string formatting accepted by OakPlot

Introduction

OakPlot is a lightweight plotting program written in JAVA. The command line interface is based on the program Gnuplot. The following documentation will provide information on the current functionality OakPlot.

OakPlot is started by typing:

java -jar OakPlot.jar

This will start up a plot window with a size of 640x480. Alternatively the following can be used to specify a variable plot size:

java -jar OakPlot.jar -size=wxh

The resulting interface contains the plot area and a command line. The simplest command for plotting in OakPlot is:

plot "filename.dat"

This assumes that the data in filename.dat is in a format accpeted by OakPlot. See File Formats for a detailed description of the data file format.

The command will load the first two columns in the data file and plot column one along the x-axis and column two along the y-axis. The points are plotted using the default point and color.

To run OakPlot in batch mode use the following command:

java -jar OakPlot.jar filename.oak

Where filename.oak contains a list of OakPlot commands.

Commands will provide examples of the commonly used commands. The section titled

Commands

The OakPlot commands are based broadly around 3 types:

• Plot Commands - Plotting data
• Set Commands - Setting plot objects
• Program Commands - Program commands

Plot Commands

OakPlot at present has 1 command for plotting data. The command in it most verbose form is as follows:

plot "filename.dat" u n:m w type

This command can be split into 3 parts:

• filename.dat - The file containing the data
• u n:m - use columns n and m from the data file. Column n will be plotted along the x-axis and column m will be plotted along the y-axis. If only one column is supplied, then the x-axis data runs from 1 to M where M is the number of data points.
• w type - with the default type. type can be defined as follows:
  • p - Default point type
  • l - Default line type
  • lp - Default linepoints type

Set Commands

There are a large number of set commands which makes OakPlot hgihly configurable. Most are of the form:

set object value

They are listed in the table below:

Command	Description
set title "Title"	Sets the title of the plot to "Title"
set xlabel "X-Label"	Sets the xlabel of the plot to "X-Label"
set ylabel "Y-Label"	Sets the ylabel of the plot to "Y-Label"
set screensize 640x480	Sets the size of the plot on screen to 640x480
set size 640x480	Sets the size of the plot when saved to disk as 640x480
set pointsize 1	Sets the pointsize to 1
set grid	Sets the plot grid

Each set command has an unset command which has the opposite effect. The unset commands have the form:

unset object

The unset commands will return the specified plot object to its default value.

Program Commands

File Formats

OakPlot currently supports the plotting of 2D data arranged by columns in an ASCII text file. The data file will contain columns 1 to N, where each column is a data set with each row describing a data point in the data set. OakPlot can plot any combination of columns dependent on the plot command.

For example, the data file may contain the information of a particle over time. Each column is a property of the particle such as time, position, velocity, acceleration. Each row contains the value those properties at a particular time

String Formats