DrawGraph - User's Manual

DrawGraph is a program for creating graphs from data files. Currently it handles only one one-dimensional data set on one graph. DrawGraph is a Public Domain software with source code distributed along with Amiga executable. Source is however AmigaOS specific and not written with cross-OS portability in mind. On the other hand it should work in any AmigaOS compatible environment be it native Amiga, MorphOS, UAE, Amithlon, or AmigaOS XL. It can be also probably recompiled for MorphOS PPC native executable or AROS (please contact me if you succesfully port DrawGraph, or have problems with porting). DrawGraph is developed using GCC C++ (2.95.3) compiler on real Amiga 4000 with CyberStormPPC and Prometheus.

Hardware and software requirements

operating system: AmigaOS compatible environment with system 3.x, at least 68020 CPU (or emulation).
non-standard libraries: None.
graphics system: No special requirements, ECS 640x200 will do, program is RTG compatible.
memory: About 100 kB for the program + memory for data sets. Note that DrawGraph does not load entire data set into memory.

What you can do with DrawGraph?

With DrawGraph you can:

Load data contained in ASCII data file.
See it in a window drawn as two-dimensional, autoscaled step-style diagram.
Save this diagram in Encapsulated PostScript format (directly loadable to WordWorth and GhostScript).

Loading data

Data for DrawGraph should be an ASCII text file containing one number in every line. DrawGraph support normal and scientific notation, here are some examples:

      3.345
      45
      -27.54
      +645.004
      -2e-5
      +7.3987433435e-06
      735e+2

Every line not convertable to a floating point number will be ommited. Any superfluous characters after a number in the same line will be ommited too.

To load a data set just run the program. File requester will popup immediately, where you can select the data file. DrawGraph can load very large files since data file is not entirely loaded into memory, it is only scanned. For example with 2 MB of free memory you can load about 20 MB data file. After the data are scanned DrawGraph performs autoscaling and shows the graph in a sizeable window.

Saving the graph

Current version of DrawGraph supports only one save format: Encapsulated PostScript. It is vectorial graphics format, it means it can be scaled without quality loss. EPS files are directly loadable to most popular Amiga wordprocessors like FinalWriter (not tested however) or WordWorth (tested). Note that WordWorth reqires post.library to be instaled in the system. You can also use GhostScript, a freeware PostScript interpreter, to print files produced by DrawGraph. DrawGraph EPS files use 'Helvetica' font of size 12 points for axes scales. Unfortunately this is hardcoded in current version and can be only changed via editing EPS file by hand (not that hard since EPS is a text file and the font is set once at the beginning of file, but remember the graph layout is based on Helvetica 12 metrics which is again hardcoded into the program).

Future of the program

DrawGraph is limited in many ways now. It is written in C++ however, with expandability in mind. So you can expect following improvements soon:

More customizable graphs - custom fonts, colors, line widths and styles.
Multiple data sets on one graph.
More graph styles.
More input formats - Raw single and double IEEE numbers, audio samples.
Conversion between input formats, e.g. saving WAV sample as raw IEEE or ASCII.
More output formats, vectorial (IFF DR2D) and bitmap (IFF ILBM).
Printing to PostScript (almost done) and raster printers.

Contact with the author

You can reach me at e-mail address krashan@amiga.pl. Feel free to send bugreports, suggestions, bugreports for this manual (English is not my native language), or anything else (but no strange white powder please ;-).