plotting package for box plots

[James Darrell McCauley]

Stephen B. King (sbk at apwk01g3.abrfc.noaa.gov) writes on 17 May 1995:
>I am looking for a cheap / free plotting package capable of displaying 
>raster data in a box plot or quantile plot graphic.  Preferably, the 
>display would produce Postscript publication quality output.  Other 
>statistical analysis would be helpful.  Anybody know if such a package 
>exists?  

you may want to look at gnuplot:
 ftp://ftp.dartmouth.edu/pub/gnuplot/gnuplot3.5.tar.Z
FTP by email is available from this host.  Send a message to
ftpmail at ftp.Dartmouth.EDU  with the word "help" as the text.

There's a Gmakefile (disguised as makefile.g) in the distribution and
a GRASS terminal so that plots can be made to the GRASS monitor (as
well as PostScript, MIF, LaTeX, etc). This makes g.gnuplot.

You may need to write a front-end to coerce [g.]gnuplot to do box-plots.
E.g., see ftp://pasture.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/mccauley/grass/s.probplt.tar.gz
for a front-end to plot sites in a (log-)normal plot. You might check
with comp.graphics.gnuplot to see if anyone has done something similar.

The new version of gnuplot (in beta testing) include gnufit, which
*may* include some useful statistical analysis routines (I know that
it does curve fitting, but I'm not sure what else).

FWIW, gnuplot runs on most every computer/OS that I've ever heard of.

Darrell
-- 
James Darrell McCauley, PhD        http://soils.ecn.purdue.edu/~mccauley/
Dept of Agricultural Engineering   mccauley at ecn.purdue.edu
Purdue University                  tel: 317.494.1198 fax: 317.496.1115