Plotting General Floating Point Data

The programs that are used for viewing general floating point data (data without SU headers) in the X-window environment are

• XCONTOUR - X CONTOUR Plot of f(x1,x2) via vector plot call,
• XIMAGE - X IMAGE plot of a uniformly-sampled function f(x1,x2),
• XWIGB - X WIGgle-trace plot of f(x1,x2) via Bitmap,
• XGRAPH - X GRAPHer Graphs n[i] pairs of (x,y) coordinates,
• XMOVIE - image one or more frames of a uniformly sampled function f(x1,x2).

Try the following. Make some binary data by stripping the headers off of some SU data. For example

% suplane | sustrip > data.bin
n1=64 n2=32 d1=0.004000
nt=64 ntr=32 dt=0.004000
ns=64

The items which follow indicate that the dimensions of the data set are ``n1=64'' by ``n2=32.'' Now view these data in each of the plotting programs listed above (except xgraph) via:

% xcontour < data.bin n1=64 n2=32 title="contour"  &
% ximage < data.bin n1=64 n2=32  title="image"  &
% xwigb < data.bin n1=64 n2=32  title="wiggle trace"  &
% xmovie < data.bin n1=64 n2=32  title="movie"  &

Please note that the ampersand ``SPMamp;'' is a Unix command telling the working shell to run the program in background.

To test xgraph, make an ASCII file containing a double column listing of pairs of data to be plotted such as the following

1 1
2 1.5
3 3
4 8
10 7

Call this file ``data.ascii'' Then use a2b to convert the file to binary and then plot it with xgraph

% a2b < data.ascii n1=2 > data.bin
n=5
% xgraph < data.bin n=5

Note that the ``n=5'' that is echoed by a2b is the same as the input to xgraph.

When you are finished, and wish to get rid of the windows, you may click on the window and type the letter ``q,'' for quit. On some systems, you may have to actually select the ``destroy'' option by clicking and dragging on the square in the upper left hand side of the window frame.

Please note that all of these programs have a huge number of options, reflecting a fairly large collection of functionalities. See the selfdoc of each of these programs by typing

% programname

or

% sudoc programname