PGPLOT module for Perl
----------------------

Karl Glazebrook

karl_pgplot at mac dot com

Last update to this file: Apr 10th 2006


This module allows the use of the the PGPLOT graphics library from the
popular Perl scripting language. PGPLOT makes it very easy to process
and plot data using the powerful file and text manipulation facilites
built in to Perl.  Perl provides a superset of the features of the
useful UNIX utilities awk and sed and is the `Swiss-Army Chainsaw' of
UNIX programming.

Because Perl is a scripting language a program can be changed and rerun
to instantly see the effect on a plot.  This makes program development
a lot faster and much more fun than when using PGPLOT from fully
compiled languages such as C or FORTRAN. Users of MONGO and SM will be
familiar with this style of programming. Perl also allows you to create
advanced World Wide Web page features and/or routinely do system
management tasks (Perl handles regular expressions, files and sockets
with equal ease).

PGPLOT is a very popular library for plotting astronomical data. (As a
glance through any issue of ApJ or MNRAS will confirm.) I have always
found that with PGPLOT I could produced far nicer and more complex
plots than I could with MONGO but it was always harder to use because
it had to be done from C or FORTRAN. SM is a nice package, but the
language is primitive in comparison with Perl and it is not free
software.

The PGPLOT module for Perl is free software and provides a complete
Perl interface to all of the PGPLOT library functions. It builds
against the PGPLOT C/FORTRAN libraries.

The core module is available from The Comprehensive Perl Archive 
(CPAN) network in the directory 

http://search.cpan.org/search%3fmodule=PGPLOT

----------------

Installation instructions - see the file INSTALL

Problems - see the file HELP

News - see the file CHANGES for new features/bug fixes.

NOTES FOR LUT TABLES
--------------------
The colour tables were taken from STARLINK's GAIA distribution, where they
have the GNU copyleft. Further information on STARLINK and GAIA can be found
via http://star-www.rl.ac.uk/ and http://star-www.dur.ac.uk/~pdraper/.