Veusz-a-like

I’ve just been finishing and putting up a copy of a program that can process a recording to produce and display the ‘Wow and Flutter’ details of a turntable. Yes, ye olde LPs still get used, it seems! :-)

However to this decently on Linux I’ve used ‘Veusz’ as it lets me plot a set of graphs including some polar examples. I’d love to update the RO version of this program to do something similar. But as things stand I suspect I’d have to DIY the graphics using !DrawGen (1). So I’m raising here the apparently lack of any near-equivalent of Veusz for RO… unless someone tells me different?

!Tau can do nice, individual, ‘rectangular’, plots, but not something like a polar one. So is there anything that can put an assortment of graphs onto a ‘page’ in the form of a DrawFile or pdf? Apps like !Plot so far as I know, we lost years ago. What’s left?

(1) Given that I wrote this, I mention it. It could do the job, but only with my taking a ‘knife and fork’ approach. More fiddly than the ease of Veusz!

I used to use GPlot. From what Wikipedia has to say about Veusz, it looks as if for an RO port you need to port Python, PyQt and NumPy. That might take a while.

Veusz certainly has a ‘Python-like’ language for its scripting files, so no surprise if its based on Python.

I presume old apps like !Plot, etc, are now long gone – obsolete and with no source code available?

The only alterinative from my POV would be to try writing a sort of Veusz ‘translator’ library based on having !DrawGen produce the end result. But given that I’m clueless about Python I’d probably do it via ‘C’ if I ever summoned up the ability/time/effort. So it would be really nice if someone could pop up an alternative.

FWIW the Linux program I’ve written will accept a wav file recording of a test tone and autogenerate something like this

http://jcgl.orpheusweb.co.uk/temp/ATPLnew2.pdf

via Veusz. Would be good to be able to do the same sort of thing on RO.

David Snell updated Graphbox Professional to run on modern hardware. I’m not sure it’s as good at mathematical plots (I do have a copy of Plot from Clares, and IIRC it was probably “best of breed”) but it runs on modern hardware and ouputs draw. Certainly when GraphPro came out, it was well-respected as one of the best RISC OS graph plotters, but to be fair, that was 1990ish. There’s also Chartwell and DPGraphs (Datapower), but they’re more limited. Chris Johnson has some nice graph plotting software too.

Since all output draw files, you can assemble them in !Draw or in Artworks or OvPro/Impression. Then generate PDFs from there.

I’m not sure the graph plotter itself needs to offer multi-graphs-per-page given the power of drawfiles on RISC OS. They really are a hidden gem. Well, not so hidden – we’re all probably well aware of the advantage that having a native vector graphics format has brought over the years!

I’ve had a furtle and found my old copy of !Plot. It does run using Aemulor, but gives results that seem rather poor in presentation for the polar plot. Maybe I need to also find the handbook.

I’ll have a look at Graphbox Professional!

However the point of the combined set of graphics and values is that the combination make analysis easier. And it can be a PITA to have to generate four graphs to show at the same time if they have to be done one by one.

Agree about Draw because I’ve just been extracting polar plots from three different example turntables for a comparision to show in a magazines. :-)

The Graphbox Pro webpages have a link that says it offers a printed manual. However that just goes to a page saying that Graphbox Pro is no longer available. Is there a manual available in electronic form?

Email me about it – I can check the !Store zip. I’m 95+% sure there’s a manual in the zip.