Clustered Bar Graphs in Mac OS X

twood — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 19:28:59 +0000

I use gnuplot for most of my graphing needs, but using it for complicated bar charts has always been a pain. Fortunately, there is a very handy clustered/stacked bar chart generator which wraps gnuplot in a nice perl script to add some extra features. I’d used it previously under Linux without any problems, but to work on a Mac you need to first setup gnuplot (which can be a pain), plus you need the fig2dev utility to actually produce the final output files. Luckily, I found a copy of it compiled for OS X on the jfig webpage, and although it has a warning from 2006 that it may not work on Intel Macs, it works fine on mine. This will let you make eps/pdf versions of your graphs which will work nicely in latex documents.

Setting up Gnuplot on a Mac

twood — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 19:29:21 +0000

I wrote these directions down over a year ago, so they could be a bit out of date. I’d like a permanent record though since some of the steps are a bit tricky…

Gnuplot is used for making graphs. If you try to compile it normally you will get some errors. Here is how to make it work:

Download and install aquaterm – this is a program which will handle the actual plotting graphics for gnuplot.
Download the source code for gnpulot – I am using 4.2.3.
Extract the source code somewhere (double click the file in finder or use “tar xzf FILENAME” from a terminal.
Open a terminal and change to the extracted source directory.
Configure the source code distribution by running: ./configure –with-readline=builtin You must use the –with-readline flag because Mac OS X comes with a bad version of this library. More details here.
Build the source code by running make
Install the resulting package by running make install
You are done!

You can test it out by running gnuplot at the terminal and then typing plot sin(x)

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Clustered Bar Graphs in Mac OS X

Setting up Gnuplot on a Mac