ENH: to act as an "xgraph" replacement, flot needs a few more features

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As someone who used the old Unix/X11 tool called "xgraph", I can assure you 
that it was an extremely easy-to-use tool for getting data plotted very 
quickly.  You could pipe output from a perl script to it -- whatever -- with 
only an occassional glance at the man page to remind you of how to switch to 
logarithmic Y axis or whatever.  But that was a cool tool.

Unfortunately, it hasn't been ported to a non-X11 environment.  The only way to 
run it in a Windows OS is to use a cygwin port, or some such thing.  Not quite 
what I want.  I was spoiled by xgraph and from time to time find myself wishing 
I had a replacement for it.  I've been searching and searching for some sort of 
replacement that might work in Windows, and there are a few contenders, but 
NOTHING is as easy-to-use as xgraph.

Then I happened upon flot.  It seems like it should be fairly easy to put 
together a sort of "interface" web page that can quickly let you input your 
data and then show it to you in a flot graph.  And I mean a single web page to 
plot anything, to act as a sort of replacement for xgraph.  But I'm not sure 
about how hard it would be to get it to read data from a file, especially data 
in xgraph's standard input format (which is about as simple as it gets).  Not 
being much of a web programmer, I'm not even aware of how you might do that 
from javascript, or whether it is impossible due to security concerns. Before I 
found flot, I was even considering trying to port the fundamental functionality 
of xgraph from C to Javascript (using the HTML5 canvas), but realized my 
javascript mastery is not up to the challenge.  Then I noticed flot, and 
realized Flot would get you 80% of the way there.  I'm still not up to making 
the changes myself, I'm sorry to say.

Still, I want to point you to xgraph for some ideas of enhancements that could 
really help round out flot's capabilities.  Flot already can do many things 
that xgraph never could, but it's that remaining 20% and the ease-of-use 
without having to write a javascript-based client-side web-app that is missing. 
 Even if someone could provide the single web-page idea, where you supply the 
data either via a file or by copy-and-paste, that could help bridge this gap, 
especially if it provided that kinds of end-user controls that xgraph provided. 
 The rest might require some plug-in to be developed, or even perhaps more 
fundamental capabilities within flot itself.  I dunno.

You shouldn't have any trouble finding a zip to download of the most recent 
version of xgraph sources (MIT license) -- take a look at the options and 
behaviors it provided.  These evolved over time from lots of usage.  Flot has 
the tremendous advantage of being embedded in web pages, but I haven't seen any 
application of it to acting as a replacement of xgraph.  Maybe I'm the only 
person left who cares :-), but I think you might find at least a few of 
xgraph's capabilities inspiring, and if so, flot could benefit from it.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by keith.bl...@homemail.com on 7 Jan 2011 at 6:55

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I've used gnuplot myself, which was always a bit of a pain, I think, although I 
still use it from time to time. Anyway, I think your suggestion is interesting, 
and although I have a feeling this may not belong in Flot, I'll keep this open 
for now, until I get some time to checkout xgraph.

Original comment by olau%iol...@gtempaccount.com on 21 Jan 2011 at 9:11

• Added labels: Type-Enhancement
• Removed labels: Type-Defect

[GoogleCodeExporter]

There's a different project, called flotr ( a prototype fork of flot) that has 
page that almost does what you want!  
http://phenxdesign.net/projects/flotr/playground/

You'll see there that it has a section for allowing input, but it's not 
complete.

I've recently been working on porting it back to flot and plan to add the input 
side there too.  You can download what I've got so far here:  
https://github.com/ryleyb/Flot-Graphs/tree/playground-dev

I guess you're not really looking at doing it yourself, but if you do, please 
post back whatever you come up with :)

Original comment by ryl...@gmail.com on 21 Jan 2011 at 9:26

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Original comment by dnsch...@gmail.com on 4 Jun 2012 at 8:46

• Changed state: Accepted