Overview of PublishPlot — Fast Publication-Quality Plots

Using PublishPlot, you can quickly create a publication-quality plot of any table of data from any text editing or spread sheet software or saved in any plain-text file. Some applications (e.g., Microsoft Excel) seem to have hired designers to select default settings for the ugliest plots possible. The goal of PublishPlot is to have more pleasing default settings for producing good plots with minimal effort.

Using PublishPlot, you can:

Quickly convert any table of data into numeric plots or bar charts
Customize all features of the plot
Easily scale the plot to any size while conserving relative sizes of plot features
Annotate the plot with labels and arrows and shapes
Add error bars
Use statistics to plot standard deviations or create box & whisker or violin plots
Do data transformations including fits, spline interpolations, and smoothing
Plot arbitrary functions of x
Edit data in PublishPlot by simple plain-text editing methods
Enter plain text comments about the plot
Export a plot to a PDF file (or simply drag it to another application)
Create plots or transform data using scripts. Many downloadable scripts are available on the PublishPlot web site.
... and more

Automatic Plot Element Sizing

A unique feature of PublishPlot is that you never set absolute size of plot elements. Instead, all plot features are sized relative to the size of the plot. This approach mimics the way illustrators used to draft plots before using computers. For example, an old rule-of-thumb was to have plot symbols be 1-2% of the plot diagonal. Similarly in PublishPlot, all size settings are done as a percent of the plot diagonal. Even when setting font sizes in points, you are really setting a "virtual" font size that gives the actual size for a full-page, landscape-mode plot (i.e. about a 10 inch diagonal), but scales it for other sizes.

Because all plot elements are tied to the plot size, when a plot is resized (which is done by resizing the window), all features of the plot resize along with the plot. When an exported PDF file is submitted for publication, it will look good no matter what size the publisher chooses for the final typesetting.

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