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## 9 Old-Style Plotting

This section describes deprecated commands. For recommended plotting commands, see Section 8.

From version 2.0 (October 2008), STILTS incorporated three table plotting commands:

- `plot2d`: Old-style 2D Scatter Plot
- `plot3d`: Old-style 3D Scatter Plot
- `plothist`: Old-style Histogram

These provided command-line access to some, though not all, of the plotting capabilities offered by TOPCAT.

Since version 3.0 (October 2014), these commands are deprecated in favour of the more powerful ones described in Section 8. The rest of this section describes some aspects of the deprecated commands for the benefit of legacy code. The output modes and formats are the same in old- and new-style plots, and are discussed in Section 8.5 and Section 8.6. The handling of parameters and suffixes for these commands is not quite the same as for new-style plots, and is documented in the next subsection.

As a simple example, if a file "cat.fits" contains the columns RMAG and BMAG for red and blue magnitudes, you can draw a two-dimensional colour-magnitude scatter plot with the command:

       stilts plot2d in=cat.fits xdata=BMAG-RMAG ydata=BMAG

Since an output file is not specified, the plot is shown on the screen for convenience. To send the output to a PNG file, do instead:

       stilts plot2d in=cat.fits xdata=BMAG-RMAG ydata=BMAG out=plot.png ofmt=png

in some cases (including the above), the `ofmt` parameter is not required since STILTS may be able to guess the format from the output file name. Various other options for output and graphics formats are described in Section 8.5 and Section 8.6

Some of the parameters use suffixes to define data sets and therefore behave a bit differently from the parameters elsewhere in STILTS - a discussion of these is given in the following subsection. Some other plotting-specific topics are also discussed below.

- 9.1 Parameter Suffixes

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STILTS - Starlink Tables Infrastructure Library Tool Set
Starlink User Note256
STILTS web page: http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/
Author email: m.b.taylor@bristol.ac.uk
Mailing list: topcat-user@jiscmail.ac.uk