Panel

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Panel

Description

Panel is a very simple, interactive, menu-driven program, based on the PGplot Graphics Subroutine Library, to plot a stacked array of panels, each one displaying lines, symbols, and labels.

• Array of up to 9 x 9 panels. All the panels have the same scale in x and in y.
• For each panel, up to 9 differents lines can be plotted. Each line can have up to 999 points. For each line you can have error bars in x and in y. For each line you can define the line style (none, continuous, dashed, dotted, . . . ), linewidth, line color, symbol (or none) to be plotted at the points of the line, symbol size, symbol color.
• For each panel, up to 9 differents labels of up to 32 characters. For each label you can define its position, size, linewidth, color, background color
• Plots can be saved in (and retrieved from) a panel file, an ascii file (<filename>.pnl), fully commented. The panel file contains all the information necessary for making the plot. The file can be edited to fine tune the plot (see an example of a panel file panel_test.pnl).
• The graphic output is in form of an eps file, panel.eps (A4 landscape or portrait). The file is overwitten each time you change the plot.
• The present limits in the maximum number of panels, labels, characters of a label, lines, and points of a line, can be changed by editing the FORTRAN file panel.f and changing ALL the occurrences of

maxpan= 9 

maxlab= 9 

maxlin= 9 

maxpoint= 999 

character*32 lab 

by the values you need, and recompiling the file.

Installation

• Requisites: Linux system with the PGplot Graphics Subroutine Library, FORTRAN compiler, for instance g77. If you want to use gfortran, you must have compiled PGplot with gfortran too. Here are some notes for compiling PGplot with gfortran. Mac users can find a guide for installing PGplot on Mac OS X in mingus.as.arizona.edu/~bjw/software/pgplot_fix.html.
• Download the FORTRAN file panel.f in your installation directory, for instance /usr/local/panel.
• Compile panel.f, linking the pgplot and X11 libraries:

g77 -o panel panel.f -lpgplot -lX11

Mac users may need somehing like

g77 -o panel panel.f -L/usr/local/lib/pgplot -lpgplot -L/usr/X11/lib -lX11

If you use gfortran, you have to add the option

-fbackslash

to gfortran when compiling (the default behavior of g77 and gfortran with the backlash "\" character are different).

• Make a symbolic link to the executable from a directory in your path, for instance /usr/local/bin:

ln -s /usr/local/panel/panel /usr/local/bin/ 

Example

Example of a panel file panel_test.pnl, and the panel plot generated: