Re: Tables and graphs

["George N. White III" <whiteg@dfo-mpo.gc.ca>]

On Fri, 22 Dec 2000, Wouter Verheijen wrote:

> I plan to do a essay about physics with Context. The essay will
> contain a couple of tables. Most of them will be accompanied by a
> graph, displaying the same data, compared with a theoretical curve.
>
> - Which program is best suited for this? My first thought is gnuplot.
>   But that will generate (e.g.) .ps-output, thus I cannot edit the
>   graph later. Is there a solution?
>
> - Is it possible to share the measured data between the table and the
>   graph? Maybe Context can read the table as plaintext and insert the
>   \VL, \FR, \MR etc. automatically?
>
> Thanks for your advice!

I've done similar projects (although using LaTeX with the publisher's
style file).  Assuming you don't need scatterplots with large numbers of
points, you can use metapost for the plots. You can keep the data in a
convenient format and use a pair of simple programs (awk, perl, etc.) to
format the data for both table and plots.  All this can be managed with
simple makefiles so everything gets updated if you change the data.

If you aren't on unix, you may not have a make utility.  There are
both "free" and commercial versions for Win32, and there have been
several attempts to develop other tools using languages such as perl
and python that are available on most current platforms.  I suppose
there may be ways in texexec to specify some programs that should be
run before the context processing.  If the programs are simple, it
won't hurt to run them even when the output doesn't need updating,
or the programs could contain checks to omit the processing if the
output file exists and is newer than the input file.

-- 
George N. White III <WhiteG@dfo-mpo.gc.ca>  tel: 902.426.8509
  Bedford Institute of Oceanography, Nova Scotia, Canada (TZ=AST4ADT)