Overview of Plotmtv

The application plotmtv is a fast multi-purpose plotting program for visualization of scientific data in an X11-window environment. Each plot comes with a simple but functional Graphical User Interface which allows users to zoom in or pan to areas of interest on the plot or to toggle between 2D and 3D plots.

The application plotmtv and supporting documentation are available via anony- mous ftp from:

Plotmtv is run from the command line and has the following command line options:

plotmtv [-Pprinter] [-3d] [-colorps] [-debug] [-l] [-nodate] [-nopixmap] [-noxplot] [-pfg foreground color] [-pbg background_color] [-plotall] [-print] [-printcmd command] [-scale scale] [-v] datafile1 datafile2...

A complete description of all of the command line options can be found in the plotmtv man page. Some of the more frequently used flags are:

-colorps Instructs the PostScript rendereer to include colors in the description of th e plot.

-nodate Suppresses the printing of time and date stamp on PostScript hardcopy.

-l(andscape) Prints the PostScript plot in landscape (rotated) mode.

-pfg foreground_color Specifies a preferred foreground color (e.g. WHITE, GREEN)

-pbg background_color Specifies a preferred background color (e.g. RED, YELLOW)

-plotall Plots all the data sets found in a single plot.

If no command line options are invoked, the simplest use of plotmtv would be as follows:

where file.dat is a data file in the MTVDAT format. Most of this quick start document will focus on examples of creating data files in MTVDAT format.

A file in MTVDAT format consists of command lines (beginning with a $); instruction lines (beginning with a %); comment lines (beginning with a #) ; annotation lines (beginning with a @); and data lines (beginning with a data value, i.e. a number). These data set descriptors are summarized in Table 1.

Table 1 View table
Both command and instruction lines consist of = pairs, that is, an argument or keyword separated from a value by an optional equals sign "=". In general, the argument is case insensitive, while the value string is case sensitive. Multiple = pairs can be specified on a single line provided that they are separated by tabs or spaces. To provide a quick introduction to the use of plotmtv and to illustrate the creation of data sets in the MTV data format, a few example codes are presented.

Some of the different graphing capabilities include:

2D Curves

Contours Raster Maps and Surfaces

    Figure 2 Plot Contour Map with contstyle = 1, nstep = 100 from cont.f

    Figure 3 Plot Contour Map with contstyle = 2, nstep = 100 from cont.f

    Figure 4 Plot Contour Map with contstyle = 3, nstep = 100 from cont.f

Curves in 3-Space

    Figure 5 Plot 3-Space Map of a helix from helix.f

Vector Fields

    Figure 6 Color raster map of with the vector field (2x,-2y) superimposed

Additional Exercises