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CoPlot's Graph Objects
(plot data and functions on XY, 3D, triangle, and polar graphs,
and on orthographic, mercator, and conic maps)

Great Scientific Graphs

CoPlot's graphs have many features which were designed specifically to meet the needs of scientists and engineers, including These are described and illustrated below. Since graphs are one of the standard types of drawing objects in CoPlot, you can put as many Graph objects on a drawing as you want.
 
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7 Graph Types

CoPlot has 7 basic graph types: XY, 3D, Triangle, Polar, Orthographic, Mercator, and Conic. On each graph, you can plot as many datasets and functions as you want. A legend is generated automatically for the graph, but you can control its location and appearance.

graphtypes.gif

Maps - The Orthographic, Mercator, and Conic graph types are common map projections. CoPlot comes with special world map data files so you can generate maps of all or part of the world with these graph types. CoPlot also comes with special detailed map data files for the U.S. (derived from the USGS Digital Line Graph Data) with lake, river, state, county, city, park, and road information (but not city street information), so you can make maps of areas as small as a few miles across.

But otherwise, the Orthographic, Mercator, and Conic graph types are just like other types of graphs, so you can plot your latitude longitude data on top of the map data. Since you can set the axis ranges to any values you want, you can easily make a map of any part of the world. There is even a "wizard" (Graph : Make Map) that lets you specify a place name (for example, "Germany") and then makes a map centered on that place.
 


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40 Ways of Representing Data

For each dataset on each graph, you will specify an X column, a Y column, perhaps a Z column, and a set of attributes describing how the data should be drawn. There are about 40 basic data 'Representations' (ways to draw data, including lines, markers, filled areas, various types of bars, contour lines, 3D surfaces, etc.). The Representations can be further customized in an infinite number of ways by changing the color, line type, line width, marker type, fill type, background color, etc.).

Here are some of the line and marker representations. These graphs also show some variations of the graph axis attributes.

xy1.gif xy2.gif xy3.gif xy4.gif xy5.gif xy6.gif xy7.gif xy8.gif xy9.gif xy10.gif xy11.gif

Here are some of the surface representations. ("Contour Lines" is somewhat cluttered because the graph is so small.)

contour.gif contours.gif contourls.gif contour3.gif

Here are some of the bar representations.

grouped.gif stacked.gif 100percent.gif bars3d.gif histogram.gif 3dhistogram.gif
 


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Flexible Attributes

Each dataset and each other part of the graph (for example, the X Axis primary tick marks, or the Y Axis grid lines) can be further customized by changing their color, line type, line width, marker type, fill type, background color, etc. For example, the line width for one dataset might be different from the line width for another dataset.
 
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Asymmetric and Horizontal Error Bars

The upper and lower error values are specified separately, so you can have asymmetric error bars or turn off individual error bars. You can also specify right and left error values and get horizontal error bars. And you can turn off the caps at the ends of the error bars.

error1.gif error2.gif error3.gif
 


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12 Axis Types

For each axis on each graph, you can choose from 12 different types of axes: linear, log, pi, date, time, degrees, normal probability, standard deviation, probit, etc. For example, this makes it easy to make a log-log graph.

axkind.gif
 


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HTML-like Text Formatting

Text in CoPlot can include HTML-like tags to control subscripts, superscripts, italics, underlining, bold, etc. For example, '<b>' makes subsequent text bold. Wherever these can be used in CoPlot, there is a pop-up list from which you can pick a tag.
 
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Over 1000 Greek, Math, Map, Weather, and Other Special Characters

Text in CoPlot can include Greek and other characters which are picked from lists of HTML-like character entities (ASCII names for characters, for example, '&Aacute;' generates 'Á' and '&mu;' generates 'µ').
 
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150 Number Formats

For axis labels and marker labels, you can choose how numbers are formatted. There are 19 format categories (general format, scientific notation, engineering notation, date, time, degree, multiple of pi, hexadecimal, binary, etc.) and over 150 total formats.


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