PGPLOT module for Perl ---------------------- Karl Glazebrook karl_pgplot at mac dot com Last update to this file: Apr 10th 2006 This module allows the use of the the PGPLOT graphics library from the popular Perl scripting language. PGPLOT makes it very easy to process and plot data using the powerful file and text manipulation facilites built in to Perl. Perl provides a superset of the features of the useful UNIX utilities awk and sed and is the `Swiss-Army Chainsaw' of UNIX programming. Because Perl is a scripting language a program can be changed and rerun to instantly see the effect on a plot. This makes program development a lot faster and much more fun than when using PGPLOT from fully compiled languages such as C or FORTRAN. Users of MONGO and SM will be familiar with this style of programming. Perl also allows you to create advanced World Wide Web page features and/or routinely do system management tasks (Perl handles regular expressions, files and sockets with equal ease). PGPLOT is a very popular library for plotting astronomical data. (As a glance through any issue of ApJ or MNRAS will confirm.) I have always found that with PGPLOT I could produced far nicer and more complex plots than I could with MONGO but it was always harder to use because it had to be done from C or FORTRAN. SM is a nice package, but the language is primitive in comparison with Perl and it is not free software. The PGPLOT module for Perl is free software and provides a complete Perl interface to all of the PGPLOT library functions. It builds against the PGPLOT C/FORTRAN libraries. The core module is available from The Comprehensive Perl Archive (CPAN) network in the directory http://search.cpan.org/search%3fmodule=PGPLOT ---------------- Installation instructions - see the file INSTALL Problems - see the file HELP News - see the file CHANGES for new features/bug fixes. NOTES FOR LUT TABLES -------------------- The colour tables were taken from STARLINK's GAIA distribution, where they have the GNU copyleft. Further information on STARLINK and GAIA can be found via http://star-www.rl.ac.uk/ and http://star-www.dur.ac.uk/~pdraper/.