[Gretl-devel] plotting commands revamped

I've just about completed a revamp of gretl's plotting commands, with the hope of achieving greater consistency and flexibility -- and in particular, of making it possible to produce a greater variety of plots non-interactively. If people can help with some testing, that would be great. In explaining what I've done, I need to distinguish two sorts of plotting commands. The first category I'll call "pure" plotting commands: these all have as their sole purpose the production of a plot of some kind. This category includes gnuplot, boxplot, scatters, qqplot. The second category contains commands that produce some textual or tabular output, but also produce a plot (at least under some conditions). This includes: corrgm, xcorrgm, pergm, hurst, rmplot, leverage, fcast (and possibly a few others, not yet considered in the revamping). So here's the first objective: all of the pure plotting commands should support the --output=whatever option, and should behave in the following way. If invoked in batch mode (that is, via script) the default behaviour is to write an auto-named gnuplot command file (gpttmp01.plt and so on), but the --output option can be used to send the plot to a window (with --output=display) or to a named file, the format of which is governed by the filename suffix as follows; .eps -> EPS (encapsulated postscript) .pdf -> PDF .png -> PNG .fig -> Xfig .emf -> EMF (MS Enhanced Metafile) .svg -> SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) .plt -> named gnuplot command file If a pure plotting command is invoked in interactive mode (i.e. typing commands in the GUI gretl console, or using gretlcli interactively), the default is for the plot to be displayed in a window, but --output can be used to produce a specified file instead, as above. And here's the second objective: all other (non-pure) plotting commands should have an option, --plot=whatever, which acts much like the --output option above. The behaviour of these commands should be as follows. If invoked in batch mode, by default no plot is produced, but a plot (for display or to file) can be provoked using --plot. In interactive mode the plot is produced and sent to a window by default, but it can be diverted to file using --plot, or suppressed via --plot=none. I've written "should" above, but I think this is now mostly working. Here's a sample test script (which illustrates the fact that the batch-mode options are also available inside functions): <hansl> function void testplot (series y, list X) string vname = argname(y) if vname == "" vname = "y" else series @vname = y endif gnuplot @vname --time-series --with-lines gnuplot @vname --time-series --with-lines --output=display gnuplot @vname --time-series --with-lines --output=ytime.pdf boxplot @vname boxplot @vname --output=display boxplot @vname --output=ybox.pdf qqplot @vname qqplot @vname --output=display qqplot @vname --output=yqq.pdf scatters @vname ; X scatters @vname ; X --output=display scatters @vname ; X --output=scatters.pdf end function open data9-7.gdt list X = 2 3 4 5 testplot(QNC, X) </hansl> And here are a couple of examples for some non-pure plotting commands: <hansl> open AWM.gdt corrgm CAN corrgm CAN --plot=display corrgm CAN --plot=corrgm.pdf pergm CAN pergm CAN --plot=display pergm CAN --plot=pergm.pdf xcorrgm CAN EEN xcorrgm CAN EEN --plot=display xcorrgm CAN EEN --plot=xcorrgm.pdf </hansl> <hansl> open djclose.gdt rmplot djclose rmplot djclose --plot=display rmplot djclose --plot=rmplot.pdf y = ldiff(djclose) hurst y hurst y --plot=display hurst y --plot=hurst.pdf </hansl> The help text for the relevant commands still needs to be updated in many cases. Allin