Add gnuplot support to save plots in more formats

[Martin Sjölund]

Add gnuplot support to save plots in more formats. Something like:

function gnuplot
  input VariableNames vars;
  input String inputFile := "<default>" "last generated simulation results";
  input String outputFile := "output.csv";
  input String inputSeparator := ",";
  input String term := "pdf";
  // The usual plot arguments as well...
  output Boolean;
end gnuplot;

Limitations: gnuplot only supports .csv; not .mat or .plt. More recent versions have better support for headers in the csv-file, but not good enough to conform to the full csv format. You need to know the index of each variable for it to work.

Rationale: We use gnuplot to produce nice-looking plots for papers anyway. Why not integrate it into omc even if it requires output in csv format? Gnuplot supports many output formats too (svg, pdf, eps, wmf).

[Martin Sjölund]

gnuplot sample output

[Martin Sjölund]

Or maybe the output should just be the .gnuplot file so it can be manually edited since I guess people will want to use advanced features to plot as well (could do both, generate a basic plot-file and return the name of the script).

The attached file is a rather basic gnuplot/pdf file suitable for black/white printing (the shapes). Note that that structure will not work on files with variables named a[1,1], and instead would have to use the index of the variables in the file (automatically generated, so would be fine).

Anyway, let me know if this is an interesting API to add.

[Adam Dershowitz <dersh@…>]

I think that this would be a useful feature. While OMPlot is nice, it doesn't have close to the power of gnuplot.

[Martin Sjölund]

This ticket was not closed for 1.9.1, which has now been released. It was batch modified for milestone 1.9.2 (but maybe an empty milestone was more appropriate; feel free to change it).

[Martin Sjölund]

Milestone changed to 1.9.3 since 1.9.2 was released.

[Martin Sjölund]

Moved to new milestone 1.9.4

[Martin Sjölund]

Milestone pushed to 1.9.5

[Martin Sjölund]

Milestone renamed

[Martin Sjölund]

Ticket retargeted after milestone closed

[Martin Sjölund]

Milestone moved to 1.12.0 due to 1.11.0 already being released.

[Francesco Casella]

The milestone of this ticket has been reassigned to "Future".

If you think the issue is still valid and relevant for you, please select milestone 1.13.0 for back-end, code generation and run-time issues, or 2.0.0 for front-end issues.

If you are aware that the problem is no longer present, please select the milestone corresponding to the version of OMC you used to check that, and set the status to "worksforme".

In both cases, a short informative comment would be welcome.