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GRAFFER is a powerful and flexible tool for generating scientific (or other) plots of data and functions. The original version written in IDL is still available at its original site, but that is not fully free in that it requires IDL to run it and gdl (gnu data language) is still some way short of supporting all the widgets needed. For that reason, this new version is implemented as a Fortran main program, using gtk Fortran for the GUI and plplot as the plotting engine.
GRAFFER (Fortran) has been developed on Manjaro Linux, and should work on any Linux or Unix system on which gtk-fortran and plplot can be installed. The following are needed:
- A suitable Fortran compiler: that is one with support for most Fortran 2003 features, the most critical is probably a fully-working
iso_c_bindingmodule. The F2008newunitconstruct is used as well. Forgfortranthis means version 4.6 or later. - gtk-fortran: A relatively recent snapshot, as some features were added to support Graffer, not GTK4 version.
- plplot: Tested with 5.15
- cmake and pdflatex: are needed to build Graffer.
- gdl (or idl): is needed to evaluate functions.
The capabilities of Graffer are more fully described in the manual distributed with the source code.
- Plotting X-Y data with optional error bars.
- Displaying two dimensional (z(x,y)) data as contours or colour displays.
- Display functions written in gdl (or idl), including parametric functions and 2-D functions.
- Simple fitting to datasets.
- A wide range of axis and scaling options.
- Keys and/or annotations.
- Save/restore plots to a fully documented file format.
- Use gdl/idl procedures to produce Graffer plots programmatically.
Any file generated by the older IDL version can be read but there are a number of differences that arise from differences in how plplot and IDL handle some aspects of plotting, in particular:
- Fonts are handled very differently so text is likely to need tuning.
- Explicit tick marks are not supported.
- Some hardcopy options are not supported (e.g. CMYK).