forums.silverfrost.com

[DanRRight]

Currently %PL allows to plot only 9 curves on the same graph.
As an example the plot looks like this:


This approximately covers 1/2 of evolution i intended to plot.

It is obvious that this limitation on number of curves is too restrictive. Would it be possible to triple or at least double that?

[Kenneth_Smith]

Dan, take a look at the %pl[stacked] option.

[DanRRight]

I know this option. It is extremely cumbersome way to deal with the multi-plot actually resembling a hack. Even those ways we discussed lately

http://forums.silverfrost.com/viewtopic.php?t=4547&highlight=multiplot

and which plot nicely

turn out to be inconvenient after some experience with them. I stopped using them. I am asking now about just the standard plotting option to extend it a bit. It also is not ideal, but it's straightforward, simple and stable like all plotting should be.

As a side note, i think that the ideal, shortest, simplest and ultimately intuitive and obvious plotting method of multiple curves should look exactly like this

[PaulLaidler]

In the following sample code a callback function is used to make a single plot by caling draw_curvesD@. This call could be repeated for other sets of data.

[DanRRight]

Paul,

This is exactly how i made (with the help of Ken) this nice colorful plot above. It took me several days by the way. It is serving as one of my general purpose plots in the program. But what i found when tried to duplicate it and create similar plot for other part of the same program - this required me more efforts than it worth to spend time on it because to make it work flawlessly definitely will need some debug time and such code is tens and tens of lines long.

So i ended with the standard plotting way (first my plot above) which if needed could be made similarly colorful via Settings (excluding these nice Legend numbering at the right hand side of the plot but that would take even more time)

This is why i ask to just to extend the standard %PL plotting to handle 20-30 graphs instead of 9 currently. I hope this would not require much efforts. I do plots like that for different tasks happens sometimes few times per week.

[PaulLaidler]

Here is another sample. In this case there are 20 plots and the y-data is stored in a 2-dimensional array.

[DanRRight]

Paul,
Thanks for an example. I tried before "stacked" option though some complexity stopped me. May be this was on my usual mischievous devilry saturdays and i may look again at that but first my questions:

1) if stacked can do 20 graphs why regular %pl can not? What the difference?
2) does stacked handle "independent" X and Y similarly easy?

[PaulLaidler]

1) Suffice to say that to provide the extension that you are asking for would not be quick and easy.

2) As I recall, only the Y values are stacked so you only get one set of X values.

[PaulLaidler]

I think that you could leave out [stacked] in the last sample above and present the data in a way that is not "stacked". The %pl line will have many arguments but you could, for example, use multiple Fortran continuation lines.

[DanRRight]

Do i correctly understand that something like this should work ?

[PaulLaidler]

Yes. I am suggesting that it may well work but you still need

[DanRRight]

It only plots in my case 1 graph.

So i returned to your demo and made some changes.
Here is the same code above i modified (see arrows in the text), this unfortunately does not plot anything. For simplicity I made it to plot just two graphs. And also for simplicity i made number of points equal in both plots

Did i made a mistake or three? Clearly i did, as at least this method (stacked+independent) plots something in my larger code

[PaulLaidler]

The number of graphs n_graphs is not 20 in your case. Also I suggested that you do not use [stacked]. The data presentation is probably wrong as well. That's all that I will contribute on this subject.

[DanRRight]

Thanks for finding my bugs in these demos and discussion which may shed the light on limiting amount of plots %pl can do

Then here is my last question: does %pl have 9 graphs limit on standard way of plotting or it was lifted lately (we discussed to take off this limit couple years ago)?

May be somebody here will look at that and find something else i missed.

Conclusion is pretty strange so far:
1) Looks like with Stacked it complains and swearing but plots 12 graphs ( 6 of which upside down ? May be still some other mistake is still here)

2) But surprisingly without staked it somehow manages to plot 12 ...which indicates that my original program of this post made with the standard %pl method exactly like in the last demo (and which refused to plot more than 9 ) has some error (??).
I use latest compiler 8.95

Here is the final modified Paul's demo code which supposed not to work for more than 9 graphs (and it indeed does not for more than 9 in my larger code why i started this thread and i do there exactly like is shown here) but it somehow unexplainable works in this demo

[PaulLaidler]

Yes you can have more than 10 plots (with or wihout [stacked]). Simply set n_graphs to the required number of graphs.

I have looked at the code for %pl and [stacked] with [independent] means both the x and the y arrays are stacked. But Dan, if you find [stacked] difficult to use why not go back to the old way of providing the data?