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 5.1.25 / 14 February 2015
Preview release 5.99.1dev5 / 7 May 2007
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]

History

Grace is a descendant of the ACE/gr, also known as Xvgr plotting tool, based on Xview libraries from OpenWindows .[2] Xvgr 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, 5.1.23 was released on 1 October 2012.[2] Development of the next major release 6.0.0 is in progress and preview versions numbered 5.99.* have been released.[8] It is noteworthy the release in 2011 of qtGrace, developed by Andreas Winter, and graceGTK, developed by Patrick Vincent. These are two versions of Grace working natively in the Windows operating systems.

Features

Grace 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.[9]

Programs using Grace

See also

References

  1. Vaught, Andy (1996-08-01), "Graphing with Gnuplot and Xmgr", Linux Journal, retrieved 2009-06-19
  2. 2.0 2.1 Stambulchik, Evgeny (1998–2000), Grace, retrieved 2009-06-20
  3. 3.0 3.1 Stambulchik, Evgeny (1997), Xmgr, retrieved 2009-06-20
  4. Paul J Turner and ACE/gr development team (1998-05-13), Xmgr: List of changes, retrieved 2009-06-20
  5. ACE/gr development team (1998-05-10), Xmgr user guide: introduction, retrieved 2009-06-20
  6. 6.0 6.1 6.2 Grace development team (2008-09-20), Grace user guide: "What is Grace?", retrieved 2009-06-20
  7. .Grace development team (2006-05-08), Grace-6 Roadmap, retrieved 2009-06-20
  8. "Grace at NERSC". NERSC. Retrieved 15 February 2013.

External links