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Plot Window
The plot window allows you to do 2-dimensional scatter plots of
one or more pair of table columns (or derived quantities).
You can display it using the Plot (
) button
in the Control Window's toolbar.
On the plotting surface a marker is plotted for each row in the
selected dataset(s)
at a position determined by the
values in the table columns selected to provide the X and Y values.
A marker will only be plotted if both the X and Y values are not blank.
Select the quantities to plot and the plotting symbols with the
dataset selector
at the bottom.
You can configure the axes, including zooming in and out, with the
mouse or manually as described in Appendix A.4.1.2.
Clicking on any of the plotted points will activate it -
see Section 7.
The following buttons are available on the toolbar:
-
Export as EPS
- Pops up a dialogue which will write the current plot as an EPS file.
In general this is a faithful and high quality rendering of what
is displayed in the plot window. However, if plotting is being done
using the transparent markers, it won't come out right since
transparency cannot be represented in PostScript; the markers will
be rendered as if they were opaque.
Currently, if there are many points being plotted, this can result
in a rather large output file.
-
Export as GIF
- Pops up a dialogue which will output the current plot to a GIF file.
The output file is just the same as the plotted image that you see.
Resize the plotting window before the export to control the size
of the output GIF.
-
Rescale
- Rescales the axes of the current plot so that it contains all
the data points in the currently selected subsets.
By default the plot will be scaled like this, but it it may have changed
because of changes in the subset selection or from zooming in or out.
-
Configure Axes
- Pops up a dialogue to allow manual configuration of axis ranges
and labels - see Appendix A.4.1.2.
-
Grid
- Toggles whether a grid is drawn over the plotting surface or not.
-
Replot
- Redraws the current plot. It is usually not necessary to
use this button, since if you change any of the plot characteristics
with the controls in this window the plot will be redrawn
automatically. However if you have changed the data, e.g. by
editing cells in the Data Window,
the plot is not automatically redrawn (since this is potentially an
expensive operation and you may not require it).
Clicking this button redraws the plot taking account of any changes
to the table data.
-
Draw Subset Region
- Allows you to draw a region on the screen defining a new
Row Subset. When you have finished
drawing it, click this button again to indicate you're done.
See Appendix A.4.1.3 for more details.
-
Subset From Visible
- Defines a new Row Subset
consisting of only the points which
are currently visible on the plotting surface.
See Appendix A.4.1.3 for more explanation.
You have considerable freedom to configure how the points are
plotted including symbol shapes, colours, transparency and whether
fitted or joined are plotted; this is described in the following
subsection.
Next Previous Up Contents
Next: Plot Style Editor
Up: Graphics Windows
Previous: Histogram Style Editor
TOPCAT - Tool for OPerations on Catalogues And Tables
Starlink User Note
253
TOPCAT web page:
http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/
Author email:
m.b.taylor@bristol.ac.uk