WinPlot is a powerful, general purpose plotting program which runs under Windows, and which is primarily oriented toward plotting scientfic and engineering data for display or analysis. WinPlot offers a multitude of plotting options including overlaying data plots from different files, plotting data on semilog or log-log axes, specifying the line and grid styles of the plots, computing statistics for plotted data, zooming in or out to observe details of the plots, and exporting plots to other applications. A number of sophisticated analysis functions can also be applied to the plotted data.
WinPlot reads data from ASCII files containing numerical data in columnar format. The program is primarily oriented toward producing plots containing a number of graphs all sharing a common abcissa, or X axis, although separate X axes may be defined. As may be seen, WinPlot can display a number of graphs on the screen at a time. Although all plots are produced by a single instance of the program, each plot behaves as a separate, fully functional window, able to be resized, zoomed, and have its properties modified. New graphs may be added or overlaid on existing plots via drag and drop.
Data to be plotted by WinPlot may be specified most simply by just giving the column numbers of the data within the ASCII file, or, for data which is often plotted in the same format, simple files called Plot Specification Files may be constructed to specify not only the data, but also output format details such as plot and axis titles. The scaling of the axes on each graph is done automatically by default based on the input data, or it may be specified manually. Once a plot is made, it may be manually annotated and printed.
WinPlot can be run from the command line in a DOS window with the same syntax and most of the same command line options as the DOS-based PLOT program. This feature allows it to be invoked from batch files, so that multiple plots can be produced from a single command.
WinPlot's most commonly used commands may be accessed by means of toolbar buttons which are arrayed along the title bar of each plot. These commands and many others may also be accessed from a menu which is invoked by the right mouse button.
The download file is an installation program. Download it to your hard disk and then double click it to install WinPlot and its help file. An uninstall option is provided.
To quickly learn about the capabilities of WinPlot, the Help file contains a section called Demos. Run the help file and step through the examples in the Demos to get a feel for how the program works.