Graphics and Plotting
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Graphics and plotting

With the release of the UWXAFS 3.0 package, we have made a deliberate decision to discontinue our support of programs for plotting and displaying XAFS data. Our reason for this is simple: we are experts in the subject of data analysis and encoding analysis algorithms but not in the subject of graphical interfaces. While we consider our programs to be the best XAFS analysis software available, we know of many plotting programs that are better than anything we can write.

All of our programs can read and write a simple ascii file format that can be used with virtually any data visualisation program on the market. We encourage you to use your favorite such program with the output of our analysis programs.


For many years, the program IDP has been associated with programs distributed by the UWXAFS project. IDP reads a special binary file format that is generated by previous versions of the UWXAFS programs. The programs in the UWXAFS 3.0 package are also capable of writing this file format, thus are compatable with IDP. IDP can be found at Illinois Institute of Technology's XAFS Database.

The UWXAFS 3.0 programs also reads and writes data in a simple ASCII format. The data is stored in columns. For details read the File Handling document. This file format is chosen for its great flexibility. Column data stored in an ASCII format is easily transfered among platforms and is understood by virtually all plotting programs. If you have some favorite plotting program that uses the special graphics capabilities of, say, X Windows, Microsoft Windows, or Macinosh, then you should be able to use the column data format. The plotting program most often used by the members of the UWXAFS project is Gnuplot. Gnuplot is a freely available plotting package that supports a wide variety of platforms. We like it because it is fairly robust and the price just cannot be beat.

A nice front-end to Gnuplot is Fudgit. Look for version 2.41. Fudgit is an extensible driver for Gnuplot and allows the user to do data manipulation, such as e0 shifts, k-weighting, Fourier transforms, and fitted splines. Versions of this exist for VMS and DOS as well as Unix. Fudgit shares with Gnuplot the fine feature of being free.


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