Technolope ([info]technolope) wrote in [info]amitufteornot,
2007-03-28 18:09:00
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Trying Tufte with gnuplot

I made this plot with gnuplot, but it took a lot of finagling to get everything in the right place.

Questions:

1) Is this Tufte enough?

2) Does audience or context alleviate the need for the image to tell the whole story?

3) What software have you used to create Tufte-approvable graphics?



Edit (20:36) updated image:



And the default gnuplot enhanced eps output:

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  • 14 comments

[info]capital_l

March 28 2007, 23:25:06 UTC 5 years ago

Should there be units labeled on the axes? What's an Nb?

Why did you label only one datapoint for each set? Is that the lowest one?

[info]technolope

March 28 2007, 23:29:22 UTC 5 years ago

Hmmm, N_b is the "bucket size" referred to all over the surrounding text. If the title read "Speed vs. bucket size for VAMSplit k-d trees, ..." would that be better? And, true "CPU time (seconds)" or "CPU seconds" would be a better y-axis label.

The peak performance (lowest time or highest GFLOPS or lowest memory) is usually the bit of info that some people are after. I tried to label the lowest of each of the curves (but for other plots, that gets messy, so I just labelled one).

Thanks for the input!

[info]capital_l

March 28 2007, 23:38:39 UTC 5 years ago

Yeah, if the text explains it, that might be ok, but still...

[info]technolope

March 28 2007, 23:42:46 UTC 5 years ago

I'm with you now. I made more verbose x- and y-labels for all of my plots in this current paper, and I can read and understand them much faster now. The x-label now says "Bucket size, N_b".

What about the lines connecting the data? They are all solid lines now, should I differentiate them more by making one dotted and another dashed?

[info]capital_l

March 28 2007, 23:52:24 UTC 5 years ago

I'd stick with solid. I'd also make the little markers solid, as the outlined shapes makes for a lot of noise.

[info]technolope

March 29 2007, 00:03:23 UTC 5 years ago

If I make the point markers solid, I should probably make them a hair smaller, too.

[info]compilerbitch

March 28 2007, 23:53:49 UTC 5 years ago

One Very Good tip is if you can output plots in EPS format, you can generally open them in Adobe Illustrator for detailed touching up of things like line thicknesses, typefaces and such like. I write quite a lot, mostly with LaTeX, but I really couldn't live without Illustrator for my diagrams. I've tried lots of other vector graphics packages, but it's the only one I've found that 'just works' for pretty much anything I can throw at it.

[info]technolope

March 29 2007, 00:07:24 UTC 5 years ago

I tend to dislike custom retouching. Gnuplot can run off a script that I can easily copy for a new plot. Of course, it can't quite do everything: I need to place the tilted labels by trial-and error (type a number in, plot it, see if it's where I want it to be, repeat).

And being on Linux, Illustrator is not an option.

I always plot in EPS, though. It works nearly everywhere and interfaces easily with LaTeX.

[info]technolope

March 29 2007, 01:00:23 UTC 5 years ago

Didn't mean to dis on Illustrator. It's a 100% damn fine program, and I used it back in the day, but I've been 96% open-source software for the last 5-6 years. (Drat that Google Earth, a much-appreciated fly in the face of perfection!)

[info]zrblm

April 2 2007, 05:54:32 UTC 5 years ago

You can output to tgif directly from gnuplot, which opens up some retouching options.

[info]technolope

April 18 2007, 20:46:57 UTC 5 years ago

Tgif doesn't seem to properly recognize the font size of rotated text or do filled regions or fancy text manipulations like exponents. Otherwise it seems quite nice and the quality is at the level of "postscript eps enhanced" output.

[info]antarcticlust

March 29 2007, 00:35:03 UTC 5 years ago

First, I love this idea for a community - I'm a big fan. The only problem, though, is that if you're trying to use "Tufte" as rhyming with "tough," it's actually pronounced "Tuf-tee."

And for an excellent, user-friendly and very robust graphing program, I highly recommend Sigmaplot.

[info]technolope

March 29 2007, 00:55:09 UTC 5 years ago

We're glad to have you here! And there must not be any problems, because I wasn't trying to rhyme.

[info]voinov_sergey

March 29 2007, 19:03:55 UTC 5 years ago

And also you can construct excellent graphs with many customizable parameters in MatLab.
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