First, thanks everyone for all the suggestions so far.
Doug (IDS) thanks for the link - nice blog - nice to see appreciation of good musìc alongside engineering excel-ence
. As you seem to like Bach you might appreciate this
I appreciate the option of Excel + VBA seems attractive but the specific need is for BULK plotting (often 100's, if not 1000's, multiple per page) with image files as output to be able to include them a, s easily as possible in a report Annex.
Excel + VBA could be complementary for specific individual plots for further individual detailed investigations if necessary but there's the need for 'archiving' of the full set of data.
IRStuff ...
I've already had a quick look at the capabilities of gnuplot but that seems to be based around it's own 'viewer' if I understand correctly from what little I've read and that wouldn't necessarily lend itself to being able to integrate into a FORTRAN program for running within it's own GUI and graphics window (alongside details of calcs) which is what ideally I'm looking for.
i.e. a library of plotting routines, preferably in Fortran but maybe also in C/C++, which could be called from the Fortran, then plotting all the graphs to (image) files with the option of selected ones being put on screen depending on the results.
During my search I thought I'd hit on the perfect solution with a program called PPLOT, but it unfortubately doesn't support the compiler I use (Silverfrost FTN95) and there doesn't sem to be the technical possibility nor appetite for them to try to make it work.
The programming world seems remarkably short of basic X-Y plotting routines for engineers/scientists. Maybe it's the towekl being thrown in in the face of 'mighty' yet imo often time wasting Excel (we've all spent too much time tweaking plots and coming up with fancy 'clever' ways of presenting data. I'm sure, I know I have) ?
FTN95 has a weird approach, namely for many years it has been reliant on an older library called 'Simpleplot', developed end of 90's early 00's but which has unfortunately become un-updateable because of the lack of the source code. Recent efforts to 'update it' shall we say in a less than thorough way have fallen short of a fully sturdy simple capability. which is a shame. Maybe that'll change in the future but for now I can't wait.
Greg, I wondered what the heck you were talking about at first when you referred to me as 'OP' in your comment ! ... so then I googled it and it's obvious but I never realised it was there on every post !!!
An interesting offshoot though is in doing that I dropped on a post on here explaining it, along with this (thanks to member 'rowing engineer' :
"Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling with a pig in mud. After a while you realize that they like it "
- which is amazingly true, and funny ! LOL and justifies IDS's last wise comment in the first phrase of his last comment above !
