Whenever you must show a plot on a paper [think on execution time vs iterations or execution time vs sample size or population vs years] what software do you use to generate it?
Every time that I need to do a plot I start to review all the programs such as MATLAB, Mathematica or Maple. Even with Excel (which will be harder to include on tex documents but really easy to include on MS documents).
Personally, I will like to use something similar to gnuplot [scripted] since every detail can be easily defined and coded so that you can apply it to all the plots on the same paper...
In the astronomy world is very common the Supermongo plotting package (http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~rhl/sm/), which is very straightforward to use and produces high quality EPS plots which can be easily used with TeX. However, you need a license to use it (which I think, many people don't know this) although most likely your institution has already paid one which is a small amount of money and it is forever and for any amount of users.
Another option is Python with matplotlib which is completely free.
But I think, you can use any software that can produce EPS, PDF or any other format that can be used with TeX, as gnuplot that you have mentioned.
So, if you feel more comfortable using gnuplot or something similar, I would tell you to continue using it with the advantage of not having to depend on having access to a MATLAB or Mathematica license. I've seen many times people getting used to licensed programs as MATLAB or IDL and then having problems when using their laptops or when leaving their institutions because of not having access to a license.
Cheers.
As Mr. Thakur told Sigma Plot and Origin are wonderful softwares for plotting graphs
MATLAB too gives the flexibility to plot with the added ability of reuse of written script
If you use LaTeX, you might want to consider TikZ which can plot data from a text file very easily. See http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/ for examples. It requires quite some time at the beginning. But the quality of the result is totally worth it to my opinion. You can check my previous papers (http://tinyurl.com/candrepub), I have used TikZ for practically all the figures.
I'm missing an option to say "Question answered". (I can see why on a research forum this option is not given).
I have to say the TikZ looks really nice. However, I cannot always work on latex and have to go to Microsoft software...
After a week of testing, I have finally ended up using Python with matplotlib, the combination is just amazing. If anyone comes to this forum looking for THE answer, I will tell them to thank Dr. Varela and go with this combination...
Also, the fact that you can find packages wich already define all the options for IEEE journals is simplifies my life.
Hi Francesc,
I'm glad that you find my answer so useful :-)
For any other person willing to know the power of Python+Matplotlib, here there is a gallery of examples:
http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/gallery.html
Cheers
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