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Collections of Tools/Utilities

The following packages are collections of tools or utilities for performing various graphics and data analysis tasks, as opposed to the separately collected lists of graphics systems and libraries. These are usually collections of executable programs that allow you to, for example, view a graph, perform spectral analyses on data files, perform various arithmetic or algebraic operations on data files, and calculate various kinds of statistics. These packages don't have graphical user interfaces that allow you to interactively use them, but rather are used either interactively or via job script files.

These links last updated and checked on Mar. 24, 2004, only eight years after the previous update on Aug. 28, 1996.


Go to a specific package or browse the lot.


AIPS

The Astronomical Image Processing System is a software package for interactive or batch calibration and editing of radio interferometric data and for the calibration, construction, display and analysis of astronomical images made from those data using Fourier synthesis methods. The package contains some 300 distinct applications or tasks, many of which I surmise are of more general application than for just the astronomical tasks outlined above. It is available as source and/or binary for a variety of UNIX systems, e.g. Sun, DEC Alpha, IBM RS/600, Linux, HP, and SGI platforms.

[ http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/aips/]

Candis

General analysis and display utilities for gridded numerical data and written in the C language. A standard data format is used and translators exist from a number of other standard formats. This should install without major problems on UNIX machines with ANSI C compilers. This package was last updated in 1997.

[ ftp://unidata.ucar.edu/candis/]

EPIC

An extensive oceanographic data management, display and analysis system which specifically supports oceanographic time series and hydrographic data. It is a system including a data selection module and a suite of over 100 graphics display and analysis programs. System elements for data selection, display and analysis function as independent modules. The UNIX version, written in Fortran and C, includes an input/output library, a suite of graphics programs for x-y plots and contour plots of hydrographic data and time series data, time series programs for statistics, spectral analysis, and tidal analysis, a system manual, and man pages for on-line help. A list of EPIC programs for UNIX is available for quick perusal.

[ http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/epic/]

ESO-MIDAS

The ESO-MIDAS system provides general tools for image processing and data reduction with emphasis on astronomical applications including imaging and special reduction packages for ESO instrumentation at La Silla and the VLT at Paranal. In addition it contains applications packages for stellar and surface photometry, image sharpening and decomposition, statistics and various others.

[ http://www.eso.org/projects/esomidas/midas.html]

fly

A C program that creates GIF images on the fly from CGI and other programs. This program, which uses the gd graphics library, allows the creation and modification of GIF images either via a command-line interface or a script file, e.g. csh or Perl.

[ http://martin.gleeson.com/fly/]

GMT

The Generic Mapping Tools are a collection of around 50 UNIX tools that allow the manipulation and graphing of X-Y and X-Y-Z data sets and the output of the results in PostScript format. The data can be manipulated in many different ways and the results can be graphed on a multitude of projections, with just about every imaginable graph attribute easily modified. These can be used via a command line interface although it's much easier to collect a series of commands in an executable shell script that can be quickly modified or copied.

GMT data manipulation utilities include programs for taking means and medians of data sets, filtering 1-D and 2-D data sets, computing directional gradients, performing histogram equalization, performing basic mathematical operations, regridding files, fitting polynomial trends, computing various spectral estimates from time series, performing Delaunay triangulation and gridding, and more. Plotting capabilities include creating basemap plots, plotting coastlines, filled continents, borders and rivers on maps, contouring gridded data, producing images from 2-D data sets, contouring raw data by triangulation, plotting histograms, plotting sector or rose diagrams, and more. Many projections are provided including conic, azimuthal, cylindrical, and miscellanous other kinds of projections. Data files can be read in NetCDF, triplet (X-Y-Z), or binary form, with utilities available for converting data triplets into NetCDF files.

A unique feature of GMT is the High-Resolution Coastline Database. This is a five-level database of world coastlines, rivers, lakes, and political boundaries created by the authors from several other available databases. The data from these other sources were processed to create a database of polygons along with ancillary positional information that allow the appropriate utilities to easily distinguish between various geographical features and allow the shading or coloring of, for example, only land or ocean areas. The storage format also makes it easy and quick for the utilities to pick out data from a specific area. This database is available in five resolutions which are, from fine to coarse, full, high, intermediate, low and crude resolutions, with the full resolution database taking up 55.7 MB.

GMT was written for UNIX systems in the C language. As such the freely available source code should compile and install on most UNIX platforms. It has been installed successfully on Cray, Sun, IBM, DEC, HP, SGI, Apple, Next and Linux boxes running some UNIX flavor. The documentation includes a technical reference and cookbook (with many examples) as well as detailed UNIX man pages for all of the utilities. The easiest way to start is to copy one of the examples and modify it for your purposes.

[ http://gmt.soest.hawaii.edu/]

gplot

A CGM interpreter freely distributed by the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. GCM (Computer Graphics Metafile) is an ANSI and ISO standard for the storage of 2-D images. This interpreter allows you to view images in CGM format. Gplot is written in C++ and will compile with either an AT&T C++ or GCC/G++ compiler. On a generic UNIX/X11 platform it will compile with either Motif or Xview.

[ http://www.psc.edu/general/software/packages/gplot/gplot.html]

Gri

A programming language for drawing science-style graphs. It is not mouse-driven nor amenable to business-style applications, but rather can be regarded as the plotting equivalent of the LaTeX document preparation system (with a similar learning curve of an hour or so). Gri can be used either interactively or via a series of commands in an executable command file.

The capabilities of Gri include X-Y plots, contour plots, and image plots, and the user has extensive control over line widths, fonts, grayscales, and other graph components. Rudimentary data analysis functions such as regression, column manipulation, smoothing, etc. is available but it is not intended to be an integrated analysis and graphics package. Gri is also a programming language so new drawing methods can be easily added or customized versions of Gri can be created for specific applications using programming elements like statements, control structures, variables, etc. Gri also allows the use of system calls, making the use of familiar and powerful external tools possible. Online help is available by either command name or topic. Graphical output is in standard PostScript, allowing either viewing or printing via standard methods.

Gri will compile and install on most UNIX platforms (e.g. Sun, HP, IBM, Linux, etc.), PCs, and even VMS platforms. The documentation includes an online texinfo manual, a PostScript manual, a WWW hypertext manual, a cookbook with many examples, and several reference cards. Their is also a mail-in newsgroup to which questions or comments can be sent.

[http://gri.sourceforge.net/]

ImageMagick

ImageMagickTM 5.5.7 is a robust collection of tools and libraries offered under a usage license to read, write, and manipulate an image in many image formats (over 89 major formats) including popular formats like TIFF, JPEG, PNG, PDF, PhotoCD, and GIF. With ImageMagick you can create images dynamically, making it suitable for Web applications. You can also resize, rotate, sharpen, color reduce, or add special effects to an image or image sequence and save your completed work in the same or differing image format. Image processing operations are available from the command line, or from the C, C++, Perl, Java, PHP, Python, or Ruby programming languages. A high-quality 2D renderer is included, which provides a subset of SVG capabilities. ImageMagick's focus is on performance, minimizing bugs, and providing stable APIs and ABIs.

[ http://www.imagemagick.org/]

IRAF

The Image Reduction and Analysis Facility is a general purpose software system for the reduction and analysis of scientific data. It includes a selection of programs for general image processing and graphics applications, plus a large number of programs for the reduction and analysis of optical astronomy data. It provides a complete programming environment, with a command language and a Fortran programming interface. Several ancillary packages are also available. It is freely available as source code or as a binary for IBM, Mac, DEC, HP. SGI, VMS, and Linux platforms.

[ ftp://tucana.noao.edu/iraf/web/iraf-homepage.html]

Karma

Karma is a toolkit for interprocess communications, authentication, encryption, graphics display, user interface and manipulating the Karma network data structure. It contains KarmaLib (the structured libraries and API) and a large number of modules (applications) to perform many standard tasks. A suite of visualisation tools are distributed with the library.

KarmaLib provides routines to simplify the interface to the operating system. This includes process management and a powerful connection package. Using a Connection Management tool, the applications developer can launch and connect a number of modules (processes) on a network with ease. The communications support in KarmaLib forms one of the major components to the library. Full authentication and encyption support is included, making the development of secure, network-aware applications trivial.

Another major component of KarmaLib is the display support. The display system both provides an abstract interface to the underlying graphics system (ie. the X window system), and also provides much higher level functionality than many graphics libraries. As well as supporting simple geometric primitives and text display, a powerful and flexible image display system is included. This allows the direct mapping of application data structures (ie. 2-D and 3-D arrays) to display windows (canvases). These images may be animated at high speed (such as in a movie tool). The complex machinery required to handle window resize and refresh events, as well as other events (ie. mouse events) is built into the display system. Other facilities such as graphics overlay lists (which are easily networked and shared amongst processes), image editing (a simple painting mechanism, also newtork shareable) and axes display are also supplied.`

[ http://www.atnf.csiro.au/computing/software/karma/]

LASSPTools

A collection of UNIX utilities for numerical analysis and graphics. It is a set of more than 35 programs for assisting researchers with number crunching and dynamical display of graphics similarly to the way standard UNIX utilities assist with text processing.

[ http://www.lassp.cornell.edu/LASSPTools/LASSPTools.html]

Netpbm

Netpbm is a toolkit for manipulation of graphic images, including conversion of images between a variety of different formats. There are over 220 separate tools in the package including converters for about 100 graphics formats. Examples of the sort of image manipulation we're talking about are: Shrinking an image by 10%; Cutting the top half off of an image; Making a mirror image; Creating a sequence of images that fade from one image to another. The goal of Netpbm is to be a single source for all the primitive graphics utilities, especially converters, one might need.

There are over 220 separate programs in the package, most of which have "pbm", "pgm", "ppm", or "pnm" in their names. For example, pnmscale and giftopnm. All of the programs work with a set of graphics formats called the "netpbm" formats. Specifically, these formats are pbm, pgm, ppm, and pam. The first three of these are sometimes known generically as "pnm". Many of the Netpbm programs convert from a Netpbm format to another format or vice versa. This is so you can use the Netpbm programs to work on graphics of any format. It is also common to use a combination of Netpbm programs to convert from one non-Netpbm format to another non-Netpbm format. Netpbm has converters for about 100 graphics formats, and as a package Netpbm lets you do more graphics format conversions than any other computer graphics facility.

[ http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/]



Last modified: Aug. 28, 1996

S. Baum
Dept. of Oceanography
Texas A&M University

baum@stommel.tamu.edu