Release 0.14.1 of ctioga2

With the (relatively, sorry) recent switch to ruby2.3 as default Ruby version, I realized that my plotting program ctioga2 crashed with ruby 2.3 (due to a rather ugly lazy hack). I have just fixed this in release 0.14.1. Update as usual with:

~ gem update ctioga2

If you're not using Ruby 2.3, you probably don't need to update soon, though. Enjoy !

Release of ctioga2 version 0.14

The day has finally come again to release a new version of my plotting program, ctioga2. Version 0.14 features, among others:

• a new binner, useful to make histograms;
• a command to hide elements already presents, that can be very useful to make animations;
• a whole set of functionalities to make it easier to draw complex grids, including easy ways to style grid elements and a way to switch to the next grid element (picture);
• a whole series of command-file functions to obtain informations about loaded datasets;
• a way to draw legends separately by hand;
• and more, including bugfixes, better error reporting, such as when some of the numbers are infinite, and much much faster debug output.

As usual, the best way to update the package is running:

~ gem update ctioga2

An updated Debian package should find its way to the archive later on today. Have fun !

Releases 1.19.1 of Tioga and 0.13.1 of ctioga2

I've just released the versions 1.19.1 of Tioga and 0.13.1 of ctioga2. They both fix installation problems with recent versions of Ruby. Update as usual, though that isn't strictly necessary if you've managed to install them properly.

~ gem update tioga ctioga2

Release 1.19 of Tioga

I've just released Tioga version 1.19. It fixes a couple of bugs, and finally brings the possibility to change the resolution of the target PDF file. A version of ctioga2 that needs this new feature should be published soon. Enjoy !

Rubyforge is dead, but ctioga2 goes on...

In the light of the frequent recent downtimes of rubyforge, and thanks to the information from @copiousfreetime, I finally decided to move the hosting of ctioga2 away from rubyforge, to sourceforge. Transition went smooth, git is now the only VCS. Code is hosted at sourceforge and mirrored at github.

Work goes on on ctioga2. I've recently implemented a decent support for histograms. It is already much more powerful than the one in the old ctioga, but it is far from being feature-full. Here's a preview.

I'm slowly preparing a new release for ctioga2, that would incorporate quite some fixes since the last time, and quite a few nice features in addition to the histograms. Stay tuned !

Release 0.7 of ctioga2

Quite a bit of work has gone into ctioga2 since my last post. Among the most interesting features, ctioga2 now features:

• full windows support, including proper file types associations
• fill syntax as powerful as gnuplot's
• an impulses plot style
• unclipped plot elements along with full control of the curves depth: in front of axes, behind background lines...
• control of symbol size through a Z axis

The latter feature proved actually instrumental in a research project under way in my lab (which is why I wrote it in the first place). It is demonstrated in the image above, made using this code.

I've also started the gnuplot versus ctioga2 gallery I was speaking about in my last post, where I try to reproduce most of gnuplot's examples using ctioga2; it can be found here. While I don't like so much the look of the gnuplot graphs, and I try to keep the look of ctioga2's as close as possible to that look, it proved invaluable in detecting small bugs, fixing small glitches and providing inspiration for new features.

In the meantime, my todo-list for ctioga2 doesn't seem to get any smaller. Let's hope I'll implement them fast enough ! Keep posted...

First release of Tioga that works on win32

While I usually don't announce releases of tioga, as it is now mostly in maintenance mode, with not a lot of new features, today is a different story. I finally got around to try and build it on windows, and after a bit of a fight, I got it to compile and work there (I got hit by the classical fopen(file, "w") for binary files, that don't make any difference on Linux and Mac, but that do on Windows...). The release is already available on the rubyforge download page. Gems will be available later on today.

To actually make it work on windows, here is what you need to install:

• Ruby, using the one-click installer. The 1.9.3 version works just fine. Don't forget to click the box to add the executables to the PATH
• the Ruby DevKit, at the same location. Make sure you take the one matching the Ruby version you installed (there's an explicative text on the side). You need to unpack it in the directory where Ruby got installed
• you need to get a LaTeX distribution, try out proTeXt
• at this point, you may need to reboot
• then, just open a windows terminal (Execute cmd.exe) and run:
  

  gem install tioga
  

And that's it ! That also means that ctioga2 works on windows, if you run:

gem install ctioga2

Announcing version 0.5 of ctioga2

I've just released version 0.5 of ctioga2, my plotting program. While there is still quite a lot of improvements I'd like to get in some day, the past few days have seen a lot of activity. Probably the most important change is the new space-separated command file format, much simpler than the old one (which is still supported, although marked clearly as deprecated now). Another important change for the users is the large improvement of error reporting: in most cases, ctioga2 pinpoints the exact location where things go wrong; it also features reporting on LaTeX errors. The last important feature is also the introduction of real contour plots, such as the one below, coming from the documentation:

Now, I feel like ctioga2 is coming close to gnuplot in terms of features and ease of use. Part of my plans for the website is to create a gnuplot mockup gallery, in which I would take as many examples from the gnuplot website as possible (ie all the ones ctioga2 can reproduce) and compare the code and look of both.

Among features I'd like to implement for ctioga2, here are the ones that I think are the most important ones:

• plot styles (histograms, bars, impulses), in the spirit of the plot with instruction of gnuplot
• complex axes: broken axes and linked axes
• full control of the tick labels and positions (alternative formats, placing ticks at multiples of π, and labelling them as such...)
• full styling using CSS-like stylesheets
• a windows port would be nice, too

But maybe you have other ideas you'd like to see before that ?

ctioga superseded by ctioga2

First, some historical details: some 6 years ago, I discovered Ruby together with Tioga, a great library for producing plots. That immediately resulted in my first Ruby program, ctioga. But as years passed and more features were forced into ctioga, I was compelled to see my initial design mistakes, and think about a complete rewrite.

This is where ctioga2 was born, some time at the beginning of 2009. I completely stopped using the old ctioga a few month after starting to work on ctioga2, but it took ages before I finally came up with a decent enough documentation to release and announce publicly. But now, it's done, and the first public release of ctioga2 is out, still fresh !

Here are a few highlights of the differences:

• For me, it's day and night: adding new commands is painless: I only need to create an object with the appropriate code; registering is done automatically.
• Now, command-line switches also accept options looking like this /option value that allow many small tweaks I had never had the courage to write for the old ctioga as it was way too painful to add new commands there.
• ctioga2 can be driven both from command-line and using command files, in the style of gnuplot, which is the reason why I call it polymorphic.
• More importantly, I finally had the possibility (and more or less compelling reasons, to be found in a paper currently in press) to implement 3D data displays in ctioga2, in the form of color maps (that's what is shown here).
• There are still a few things that could be done by ctioga and that miss from ctioga2, such as histograms. When I have some time and/or motivation...

In any case, you can make yourself an opinion of ctioga2 by looking at the galleries.

Enjoy !

Process substitution is cool !

I've finally found some time to work on ctioga again ! My main problem there is that I keep adding new features without ever bothering to document them... One of my main concerns is therefore to find out about the list of command-line switches that are not documented in the manual page. I've just written a neat shell one-liner that precisely does that:

diff <(man -a -l $HOME/SciYAG/ctioga/doc/ctioga.1 | \
  egrep -o -- '--[a-z0-9-]+' | sort | uniq) \
  <(ctioga --help | egrep -o -- '--[][a-z0-9-]+' | \
  sort | uniq) | colordiff | less -R

(of course, I broke it into lines for clarity). It is based on process substitution, a shell trick that lets you use the output/input of a shell command exactly as a file on command line. Neat ! The trouble is, replacing the colordiff... part by | egrep '^>' | wc tells me there are 65 undocumented features... Lots of work in perspective, and I'm not sure I'll do it all before the 1.9 release...

What ctioga is missing

I haven't posted for a long while about ctioga, but that does not mean that development has stopped. It goes on, and features get added basically every single time I need them. Recent additions make it possible to tune a little more the look of the legends and add pure text lines in them.

I've however realized that now, what ctioga is missing the most is real flexibility over the coordinates. For now, all coordinate positions are either relative to the frame (such as for --inset) or to the graph (for --draw). What I really wish is a way to mix all kind of coordinates: real size (1cm), frame position and graph position. That will require quite a fair deal of work, of course, but that shouldn't be too difficult... I'll go on posting about it here.

ctioga's non-linear axes

Much as been done on ctioga since the last release, not even two weeks ago: small bug fixes, tangents improvements, the rebirth of a --subplot option, a saner framework for plot styles... But the most significant improvement in my opinion is the possibility to make non-linear axes: you just need to provide a two-ways transformation between the standard coordinates and the axis coordinates, and ctioga does the rest:

ctioga -N --xpdf --math --math-xrange 2:8 \
  'sin(x)' --xaxis bottom --new-axis biniou top \
  --axis-function biniou 1/x 1/x \
  --lines-color biniou Gray --no-title

As you can see, I did profit to add the possibility of background lines corresponding to the axes' major ticks. The only real trick that is left is to find a decent way to partition the target segment so that they ticks are "natural" (not 0.34759, for instance) and reasonably equally spaced. I thought other plotting programs had dealt with this, but in fact, that doesn't seem to be the case: I'll have to do that myself.

Uniform probability does not apply to real life !

I've always been puzzled that, quite often, a package is totally silent for a long while (say a month or two), and suddenly, you get two or three bug reports the very same day, distant from any release or transition to testing. I've seen that mostly with libqt4-ruby and pmount. This seems to be rather general: it really looks like events of our lives don't even remotely follow uniform probabilities.

I've had a recent confirmation with ctioga, a project of my own. I just need to decide to release a new version to realize just afterwards that I've got many more features to add (not less than 20 significants commits since the release a week ago !)... Life is not linear ! (and I won't complain).

gnuplot-compatibility backend

I used to work a lot with gnuplot. For what matter, I still do. I find it very convenient to write simple models (the one you can solve analytically), especially with the help of gnuplot-mode, a mode for editing gnuplot files and interacting directly with gnuplot, rather more smoothly than the standard gnuplot interface. But, you might have guessed, I don't like how gnuplot's output looks. After all, that's why I did write ctioga!

So what ? I won't use ctioga for playing with my models, as it has not been designed with interactivity in mind, and will most probably never be (that would somehow defeat it's purpose). But I don't want to do the same work twice, especially if the second time is way more tedious than the first...

So I wrote a new backend, gnuplot, whose job is to feed a file to gnuplot and tweak it so that ctioga gets the data of all the plots. Imagine you have a file biniou.gnu in the spirit of

a(x) = x**2 + 2*x + 1
plot a(x), x**2 - x

Then, you can plot both a(x) and x**2 - x with the following command-line:

ctioga --gnuplot biniou.gnu@1##2

Note that it only takes data ! Style is completely dismissed.

ctioga's new options shortcuts

I implemented today something I had in mind for a long time: a way to pass options in a slightly more convenient way to ctioga. I'm thinking mainly about the pain of writing, say,

ctioga --math --math-samples 200 'sin(x)'

when one would rather like to write

ctioga --math --samples 200 'sin(x)'

Starting from SVN revision 637, the latter form is possible. Specifically, when an option is not recognised, ctioga tries the following:

• if it looks like a shortcut, ctioga uses a shortcut
• if it corresponds to an option of the current backend (such as --samples for --math-samples), the corresponding option is used
• failing that, ctioga complains

You can see the beauty of these options in the attached graph, produced by:

ctioga --xpdf --math --samples 200 \
  --cloud --filled 'sin(x)'

ctioga and tick labels

On ctioga's forum, I was asked to provide a way to turn tick labels - which there currently wasn't. But, in fact, the structure was already there. The SVN commit 632 has seen them in. See for yourself the result of

ctioga --xpdf --math --interpolate 'sin(x)' --scale yticks 2.2 --angle xticks 45

As with the title and other friends, options are available, to control the shift, scale and angle of the ticks. However, the color cannot currently be changed this way (this is a Tioga limitation).

Ruby

Well, I couldn't really start a blog without writing a small article about this fantastic programming language, Ruby. It all started when a friend of mine posted a message about the Tioga plotting library.

He said that this library was producing great plots (he saw directly plots made by its creator, Bill Paxton). When I saw this video, I was sincerely convinced !

So then, as the library was only for the Ruby programming language, I started immediately to learn Ruby, using the Pragmatic Programmer's Programming Ruby. I found it an extremely enjoyable experience. Within an hour, I had made my first Ruby script using Tioga. Before the end of the day, I was sending my first bug report to Bill. The following day, I had already started to work on a (very poor at that time) first version of ctioga...

I've gone on working with Ruby ever since... I wrote no less than 9000 lines of code only in the SciYAG project on Rubyforge, not mentioning other projects using Ruby and the countless scripts I have written for my everyday science... Ruby is extremely comfortable to program with. A pure delight !

ctioga's new legends

Since release 1.6 of ctioga, the legends had moved away from the graph, and were not anymore aligned with the plot's internal boundaries. It might not seem much, but the look was horrible, and, even worse, a lot of white space was inserted between the legend and the graph. I've just commited a fix to the SVN repository, and it now looks nearly like before 1.6. Great !