Housekeeping and various options
The coming options do not directly apply to the plot, but more to the material living of the plots, how to view it, how to share it with others, how to include it in a TeX file and so on. So there will be no more example, just a description of what the option does effectively:
Shell Variable
Ctioga naturally look into the content of the shell variable CTIOGA that you can define in your prefferred shell starting file. For example, the script tutorial.sh begins with
CTIOGA="--xpdf --clean-all --display-commandline" \
export CTIOGA
and thus every ctioga call will be prepended by this set of commands. A wise
idea is to set it to “--xpdf” as this options will be the most commonly
forgotten.
Viewing
You can choose to view the resulting pdf file with the viewer you cherish with
the --viewer option. For example
ctioga --viewer gv trig.dat
--xpdf and --open are short cuts to using xpdf or open (for MacOSX users,
which has the same effect as double clicking on the selected file) as viewers.
--no-viewer avoid a viewer to be opened even if you CTIOGA variable is set to
--xpdf
Cleaning
Ctioga produce a lot af auxilliary files in order to produce the final pdf
version of your plot. Most of the time, you will only need the pdf file so
that option --cleanup will erase every other files that have been created.
Nevertheless, when you will need to include your file within a TeX document so
that the font used within the plot are exactly those of your document, you
will rather use --tex-cleanup and see what remains.
If your are a cleaning maniac and want just to have a look at your datas or a
given mathematical function, use --clean-all. Don’t forget to use it together
with a viewing option, --xpdf for example.
Naming
If you want to keep the files but store them elsewhere, use the --save-dir
option to specify the destination directory which will be created if
necessary. That could be an option you would like to set with the CTIOGA shell
variable.
In that case (and other), you will want to differenciate the produced files
from one another by giving sensible names using -n or --name option as a
prefix for all generated files from tioga (default prefix is “Plot”). Note
that you would better avoid prefix containing extension name, you don’t want
to have a plot named my_data.txt.pdf, do you ? Anyway, internal processing
will failed, especially when going through LaTeX.
Misc
--display-commandline display the command line you have been using to produced
the plot on the plot itself. It can be good to demonstrate simple plots but
won’t be that useful if line is too long.
--mark is more efficient to remember which command has been used to produce a
plot. It fills the ‘creator’ field of the produced PDF file with the
command line. You can then look at it with the pdfinfo command. It is disabled
by default because the result has to be given to LaTeX which could complain.
However it does not restrain the plot to be generated so that it could be an
option to add to the CTIOGA shell variable. --no-mark option will disable it
if it is already set.
--debug and --debug-patterns are debugging tools. If you are using it, well
I’m sure your name is Vince !
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and are now ready to make full use of the power of Ctioga, Tioga, Ruby and Cie !
