Grace (plotting tool)

Grace

Preview of Grace-6, showing the Fourier transform dialogue
Original author(s) Paul Turner (Xmgr)
Evgeny Stambulchik (Grace)
Developer(s) Grace Development Team
Initial release 1991 (Xmgr)
1998 (Grace)
Stable release 5.1.22 / May 21, 2008; 3 years ago (2008-05-21)
Preview release 5.99.1dev5 / May 7, 2007; 4 years ago (2007-05-07)
Development status Active
Written in C
Operating system Any Unix-like
Available in English
Type Plotting
License GPL
Website http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/

Grace is a free WYSIWYG 2D graph plotting tool, for Unix-like operating systems. The package name stands for "GRaphing, Advanced Computation and Exploration of data." Grace uses the X Window System and Motif for its GUI. It has been ported to VMS, OS/2, and Windows 9*/NT/2000/XP (on Cygwin). In 1996, Linux Journal described Xmgr (an early name for Grace) as one of the two most prominent graphing packages for Linux.[1]

Contents

History

Grace is a descendant of the ACE/gr (also known as Xmgr) plotting tool.[2] Xmgr was originally written by Paul Turner of Portland, Oregon,[3] who continued development until version 4.00.[4] In 1996, development was taken over by the ACE/gr development team, led by Evgeny Stambulchik at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.[5][6] Development of Xmgr was frozen at version 4.1.2 in 1998[3] and the Grace project was started as a fork, released under the GPL.[7] The name stands for "GRaphing, Advanced Computation and Exploration of data" or "Grace Revamps ACE/gr"[6] Turner still maintains a non-public version of Xmgr for internal use.[6] The first version of Grace was numbered 5.0.0 and the latest stable version, 5.1.22 was released on 21 May 2008.[2] Development of the next major release 6.0.0 is in progress and preview versions numbered 5.99.* have been released.[8]

Features

Grace creates publication-quality output. It can be used from a point-and-click interface or scripted (either from the built-in programming language or through a number of language bindings). It performs both linear and nonlinear least-squares fitting to arbitrarily-complex user-defined functions, with or without constraints. Other analysis tools include FFT, integration and differentiation, splines, interpolation and smoothing.

Programs using Grace

See also

References

  1. ^ Vaught, Andy (1996-08-01), "Graphing with Gnuplot and Xmgr", Linux Journal, http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/1218, retrieved 2009-06-19 
  2. ^ a b Stambulchik, Evgeny (1998-2000), Grace, http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/, retrieved 2009-06-20 
  3. ^ a b Stambulchik, Evgeny (1997), Xmgr, http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Xmgr, retrieved 2009-06-20 
  4. ^ Paul J Turner and ACE/gr development team (1998-05-13), Xmgr: List of changes, http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Xmgr/doc/CHANGES.html, retrieved 2009-06-20 
  5. ^ ACE/gr development team (1998-05-10), Xmgr user guide: introduction, http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Xmgr/doc/intro.html#copyright, retrieved 2009-06-20 
  6. ^ a b c Grace development team (2008-09-20), Grace user guide: "What is Grace?", http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/doc/UsersGuide.html#ss1.1, retrieved 2009-06-20 
  7. ^ Grace development team (2006-05-08), Grace-6 Roadmap, http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/devel/roadmap-6.html, retrieved 2009-06-20 

External links