short programmer consulting job - graphing

[nuclearpolymer]

My brother's company wants a small programming task accomplished, and I'm wondering if any of you would be interested and able to do it quickly. The general idea is to make some kind of script/program that can take as input a set of X,Y data, and output a series of jpgs/pictures. The series of pictures would all have the X,Y graph of the data set,

Comments

[ringrose]

The cheap form of this goes:

Open a Google spreadsheet (or, if you have it, Excel)
Paste the X,Y data in.
Under the "Insert" tab, click "chart".
Make it a scatter chart.

Making some X/Y point highlighted is slightly harder. I know you can do it in Excel with sufficient magic.

How do they choose which ones are to be highlighted? What does it mean?

[nuclearpolymer]

Well, one point is highlighted per picture, and there are as many pictures generated as points, so it's not really that they are choosing a point to highlight so much as they want a picture of each point being highlighted.

[ringrose]

Is the number of points fixed? How many points are we talking about?
Would it be sufficient for them to pick a few points (say, six) to highlight?
(both those answers mean you can make a template spreadsheet in which you paste the X/Y and pick points)

[nuclearpolymer]

Yes, probably 100 points.
They want to highlight one point per picture. So each picture has the same graph, but with a different point highlighted.

[astra_nomer]

I could probably write an idl script to do what you want.
Or an sm script, for that matter.
Having time or inclination to do such a thing? Enh.

I understand that one can use pgplot to do make plots without opening a separate application like sm or idl, but I don't know how to go about it.

[fredrickegerman]

It should be pretty easy to get gnuplot, plus maybe a bit of shell/perl/python/etc. to do this. I just wrote a log/log scatterplotter and curve fitter that spits out gnuplot yesterday (I did my data munging in Haskell, though, because I also needed to join corresponding x and y points that are separated in time, with varying numbers of y's for each x). gnuplut can dump a bunch of images into files with a well known format. I think you can frotz the font, but it's not exactly a "pull down the menu and pick a font" kind of operation...

[yakshaver]

Yeah, I was thinking gnuplot too. I'd want a clearer idea what the actual requirements are, though - I'm sure, for instance, that gunplot can produce the required 101 graphs highlighting a particular datapoint, but I'm not certain it can do it in the manner he wants. So it would be good to know where the requirements end and the things that sound like good ideas to him start.

[nuclearpolymer]

Okey, that seems like a reasonable option...

[chenoameg]

baronet does programming for hire and I have pointed him as this entry.