Recommended (free) software to plot points in 3d

Question

I am looking for (preferably free) software to:

1) plot 3d points read from a file. A scatter plot would be fine.
2) Optionally color the points by a property - also read from the file

It would be terrific if this program could also compute and display the best fit plane through these points.

Note: if your a student, Andrew, there are some significant discounts available, e.g. on Matlab, Mathematica, not to mention word processing software. Sage.org (free-source) has Sage available on-line for use and storage of work (remember Sage contains R, GAP, 3-4 additional programs), and it can be downloaded, but I had to do so through VMWare (virtual machine)...

Sebastien · Accepted Answer · 2011-05-23 03:14:13Z

up vote 5 down vote accepted

There are quite a number of freewares which do that.

Gnuplot, with a very interesting not so frequently asked questions here, fit is easily obtained. Nice outputs to PDF and LaTeX
Matplotlib: requires Python, so that's probably not your best option if you need to produce graphs quickly, but if you are thinking about a long term solution, I would go for this one,
R, normally for statistical computations, but quite nice plotting possibilities. Also, it is a software which is intended to read data in files, so it has very powerful and easy to use functions to import CSV files and the likes,
Octave not a big fan. Don't know the new major release, though. Previous releases were based on Gnuplot for the graphic part,
Scilab has continuously grown througout the years, so as to become a monster now. Not a big fan either.

Hope you'll find your best choice here !!! Good luck, Sébastien

answered May 23 '11 at 3:14

Sebastien
36817

	Any preferences? I've got sage, with GAP, R, ..., Matlab, Mathematica, some graphics programs not readily beneficial, save for geometer's sketchpad (which can be posted to web), but I have to go through 2 saves to different formats for an image file...Would certainly appreciate "reading in capabilities", but my work is more abstract, at this point...lots of tools at my disposal, but there's also the time-factor involved in "getting up to speed" in using the software so it can be used productively...So many choices...hard to know what to focus on learning first – amWhy May 23 '11 at 4:18
	Option 1 is my favourite, but I'm partial, since I've been using it for almost ten years now. I like gnuplot, because you have the opportunity to script your plots. That's particularly useful if you change your calcs and need to update the corresponding graph(s) accordingly. Mind you, this is true of all the other options (!), but the syntax of GNUPLOT is particularly simple. Not sure I'm very helpful, here. Note that coloring points according to property read in file might be more of an issue. You can do it programmatically (options 2-5), but it would be more difficult with GNUPLOT. – Sebastien May 23 '11 at 4:52
	Thanks, Sebastien. I've already checked out your link to Gnuplot. I'll look into it a bit more! – amWhy May 23 '11 at 5:39
	This is a very useful list - I think i will start with GNUPlot Thank you :) – Andrew S. May 24 '11 at 22:10

ja72 · Answer 2 · 2011-08-04 14:13:09Z

up vote 0 down vote

Asymptote vector graphics language. Check out the gallery of graphs/plots/sketches. Here is very pretty examples/code page from France.

Iso plot Surface plot

answered Aug 4 '11 at 14:13

ja72
1,714211

2 Answers