AptPlot - A Free Pure-Java 2D Plotting Tool
AptPlot is a WYSIWYG 2D plotting tool designed for creating production quality plots of numerical data and performing data analysis. AptPlot contains extensive scripting and GUI support for the manipulation and analysis of data sets. AptPlot is intended to be a pure-Java drop-in replacement for the the Motif X-Window based Grace plotting package maintained by the Grace Team and coordinated by Evgeny Stambulchik.
Although Grace has provided extensive capability for plotting and data analysis tools for several years it is also host to several limitations, primarily associated with execution under Microsoft Windows. It is written as an X-Windows Motif application in a combination of C, LEX, YACC, and IDL coding. The software is specifically tailored for Unix machines; users working with operating systems that do not provide Unix-like functionality often found installing and maintaining Grace difficult. With this in mind, APT has developed AptPlot as a functional clone of Grace using the Java programming language.
In addition to vastly improved portability, authoring the tool in Java eases the addition of a host of other improvements, such as a plug-in interface which allows the application to be extended in any number of ways at runtime. The NRC Analysis Code specific features inherent in AcGrace (formerly Xmgr5) have been extracted into a separate plug-in.
Change Log
June 22, 2009 - AptPlot Version 6.3.0 Released.
- Please note. This version requires Java 6.0 or newer.
- The list of vectors in the Variables window (and any other dialog that displays this list) has new functionality. Vectors can now be created from the list's right-click pop-up menu. Additionally, vectors can be edited in a spreadsheet editor, similar to the dialog displayed for editing data-sets. To open this window, double-click a vector in the list, or select "Edit > In Spreadsheet" from the vector's right-click pop-up menu.
- Save Defaults and Reset Defaults menu items have been added to the Plot menu. Save Defaults will save all of the current graph settings as defaults. The Reset Defaults option will reset the graph setting the original settings.
- The Data Set spreadsheet editing dialog no longer contains an 'OK' and 'Apply' button, as they were inconsistent with the on-the-fly editing of the table data. Now, changes to the set type will be reflected immediately; attempting to change to a type with fewer columns will prompt the user before discarding data. Additionally, data set comments will now be applied whenever the user presses the Enter key in or removes focus from the comment field.
- Added semantics to an existing command: PLOTVAR can now specify a target data set as its first argument. ex: PLOTVAR G0.S1 "<vector>"
- Resolved an issue when exporting EMF images that caused a border to be painted around the plot.
- Resolved an issue where exported PostScript plots would always appear with the "Letter" size, even when using A4 or custom page size, in some viewers and printers.
- Resolved a UI regression where the set list was not appearing in the Write ASCII dialog.
- Resolved a number of issues related to restoring dialog locations and sizes in multi-monitor and virutal desktop environments.
- Banner infomation consisting of JVM and AptPlot version numbers, platform type, date, etc. was added to the log file (aptplot.screen).
The following updates were made to the ACS Plug-in for this release:
- A "Plot Axial" menu item has been added to the Data menu. This item provides access to the Plot Axial Data dialog, which can be used to easily create axial plots.
- The COBRA demuxer was updated to support demultiplexing COBRA plot files with the time channel labeled time-0.
- The channel selection dialogs have been retooled to be more consistent and to organize available options more effectively. The graph selector has been completely removed in favor of a drop-down list, whose first option is always"<current>" (indicating the plot's currently selected graph). Channel selection functionality remains otherwise identical.
- Help buttons have been added to the Axial Plot and Channel selection dialogs.