Available prefabs

chron - chronological data (dates, times, etc); tabulate by week, month, etc.	dist - frequency distribution histogram on a data field	lines - line plots with optional data points and error bars, up to 4 groups	pie - pie graphs
stack - stacked bar graphs, up to 4 levels	scat - scatterplots	vbars - bar graph of 1 or 2 groups with error bars	vbars - with error bars only

Also available:

• draw for interpreting ploticus draw commands
• multidist user-contributed prefab that does multiple, overlaid frequency distributions.
  
  
  

What are prefabs?

The -prefab command line option tells pl to use a prefab. Any of the other command options may also be used along with -prefab. For example, to use the scat scatterplot prefab you might use a command such as this:

pl -prefab scat -png data=results.dat x=2 y=4 -scale 0.7

What do I need to do before I begin?

Which parts of the ploticus documentation do I need to look at?

Will I outgrow prefabs?

Passing parameters to a prefab

Parameters may be supplied on the pl command line as var=value pairs as seen in the above example. There is a set of standard parameters that are recognized by all the prefabs unless otherwise noted; it is useful to become familiar with these. Individual prefabs also have parameters of their own.

If convenient, most parameters may be embedded in an input data file, using the #set construct:

 #set x = 2
 #set y = 3
 #set title = Correlation of WBC vs. T-Chol

Some parameters cannot be set from within the data file because they control data scanning. These are data, delim, header, and comment. There may be others as noted for individual prefabs.

Output file names

The -o option may be used to specify output file name explicitly. If -o is not given, output file naming is similar to that of pl in other contexts. For the above example the output file would be named scat.png .

Plot data

Customization

Prefabs allow quick looks at data, but there are often details that would be nice to control but can't be adjusted because there is no command line parameter to do so. One way to proceed is to copy a prefab script to your own directory and then modify your copy as needed. Another option is to make a new prefab variant in the prefabs directory.

If you just want different defaults for a prefab, you can create a shell script that invokes the prefab as you want it. Then, put a $* at the end of the pl command to pick up any overrides that the shell script user enters on the command line (if a parameter is given twice, the rightmost is taken).

Examples

All prefab examples are included in the ploticus test suite that is included with all distributions (2.02 and later).

Hints

   option:  comment=#  
   option:  delim=comma

It is possible to set parameters from within your data file using embedded #set statements.

The following pl command line options may be very useful with prefabs: -scale, -color, -backcolor, -tightcrop, -map, -debug, and perhaps -font.

Be careful not to confuse prefab parameters with pl command line options . Prefab parameters are given this way: paramname=value. Command line options are given this way: -option or -option value.

Most shells allow a backslash (\) for breaking up long commands into two or more lines.

You can get a multi line title by splitting it over two lines, eg:

    pl -prefab pie1 data=data1 fld=3 label=1 title="Travel expenditures
    By department
    Fiscal year 2000"

HTML clickmaps may be generated using the prefab clickmapurl standard parameter .

User-contributed prefabs