Comments on: Real life pgfplots examples

By: leo

leo — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:31:01 +0000

If a beginner starts with latex -> dvi -> ps -> pdf, it is asking for trouble.

By: Joseph Wright

Joseph Wright — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 07:16:03 +0000

Hello Hongbo,

It’s well known that viewing DVIs directly results in a number of restrictions. For example, unless the DVI viewer includes an EPS interpreter then any EPS figures will not show up. The DVI workflow to me implies tex -> dvips -> ps2pdf and then looking at the PDF result. Sorry if that was not clear. The key point is that pgf has driver information for both routes: compare using pstricks, which does not work with pdflatex (at least without effort).

By: hongbo zhao

hongbo zhao — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 03:44:51 +0000

for a beginner, to say pgf “works equally well with the traditional DVI-based work flow” is a bit misleading.

Initially, I could not even get Figure 1 right. Later I found out that xdvi can not properly display the generated .dvi file, I have to convert dvi to ps or pdf to see the correct figure.

(I am using Ubuntu Karmic, with xdvi version 22.84.10)

By: Joseph Wright

Joseph Wright — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 09:53:42 +0000

Yes, \pgfplotscreateplotcyclelist is very picky: I’d had the same idea, but suspect it will not work.

By: Frakturfreund

Frakturfreund — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 09:44:13 +0000

Thank you! I just tried to apply the same trick to the color definition, but this seems to be more difficult because of the not-so-easy \pgfplotscreateplotcyclelist command.

By: Joseph Wright

Joseph Wright — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 09:04:18 +0000

Good idea: I’ll update my working copy.

By: Frakturfreund

Frakturfreund — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 08:26:50 +0000

Couldn’t one simplify the last example by using the for command of TikZ: \foreach \x in {1,2,...,19} {\addplot table[y index = \x]{data-set-four.txt}};?

By: leo

leo — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 07:41:19 +0000

Hi Joseph,

I think it is excellent. I have learnt a few new things about pgfplots.

Leo