MC’s PlotXY—A general-purpose plotting and post-processing open-source tool

Abstract

MC’s PlotXY, in the following just called PlotXY, is a free piece of software able to make line plots and bar charts from data deriving from measuring devices or simulation programs using several formats. It allows to visualize and post-process these data without the need to have on the target computer the original software that generated it. It was written from the ground-up having researchers and scientists in mind, and therefore is optimized for speed, clarity, soundness.Its special characteristic distinguishing it from the large base of existing plotting software is its flexibility: using this small piece of software, the user can do plotting and post-processing activities on the results obtained from other sources (simulation software or measuring devices) without having these sources installed on the computer where post-processing is made.Moreover, it allows reading file formats rarely available on non-specific software, such as ATP, Comtrade, LabView formats. Although the support of some of these formats is not complete, being the software open-source, anyone can contribute to expanding them, operating on just a single cpp file.It is developed using the Qt platform, which allows good GUI design, and already available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux systems.This paper describes the software characteristics and some programming techniques used to develop it. Keywords: Line chart, Bar chart, Post-processing, Fourier series, Matlab, Lab-view, ATP, ASCII