BSD plotutils

Standard UNIX plotting utilities ported from 4.3BSD (and partially from UNIX V7) to modern OSes.

Why?

I initially ported these programs in 2018 to learn basics of the C language and UNIX.
The current goal is to create a library and CLI tools to generate simple graphs in popular formats.

Available drivers

Historical

• aed — AED 512 color graphics terminal.
• bitgraph (aliases: bg) — BBN bitgraph terminal.
• hp7221 (aliases: hp7) — HP 7221 graphics terminal.
• hp2648 (aliases: hp, hp8) — HP 2648A graphics terminal.
• imagen (aliases: im) — Imagen laser printer (default 240 dots-per-inch resolution).
• t300 — DASI 300 or GSI terminal (Diablo mechanism).
• t300s — DASI 300S terminal (Diablo mechanism).
• t450 — DASI Hyterm 450 terminal (Diablo mechanism).
• t4013 — Tektronix 4013 storage scope.
• vt0 — DEC VT100 graphics terminal.
• gigi (aliases: vt125) — DEC VT125 graphics terminal.

Modern

• t4014 (aliases: tek) — Tektronix 4014 or 4015 storage scope with Enhanced Graphics Module. It is available as XTerm mode (xterm -t -tn tek4014).
• dumb (aliases: ascii) — Simple ASCII output.

Portability

This code was originally written in the pre-POSIX era and uses some non-portable features. Platforms confirmed to work:

• Ubuntu 20.04 LTS x86_64
• FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE amd64
• Darwin 22.2.0 arm64

Future code should conform to the C23 standard if possible.

Backwards compatibility

Programs and libraries should be compatible with versions available in UNIX V7, 4.3BSD and System V flavours (e.g. Solaris, AIX).
Compatibility at the source code level can be achieved through the header plotcompat.h.
Bugs compatibility is not guaranteed.

Contents

This repository contains the libplot library with its drivers and programs (as well as manual pages for them):

• plot — reads plot in device-independent binary format and draws it on the device.
• tplot — alias to plot (for compatibility with SVR4 shell scripts).
• graph — reads points and draws plot in binary format.
• vplot — variant of plot that draws only on Versatec plotter (for compatibility with SVR4 shell scripts).
• atoplot — reads plot in text format and converts it to binary (useful for debugging).
• plottoa — reads plot in binary format and converts it to text (useful for debugging).
• spline — reads points and generates more via smooth curve interpolation.

Building from source

You need POSIX-compatible shell and libraries, CMake >= 3.24 and a C compiler (Clang is preferred) with C23 support.

$ ./build.sh -dsp

This will build a tarball in the dist directory.