Beginner's IDL - Line Plots I

• Plotting Coordinate Systems
• Displaying Data as a Line Plot
• Customizing your Plots
• Choosing a Line Style
• Choosing a Plotting Symbol
• Annotating your plots
• Exercise

Plotting Coordinate Systems

IDL can use any one of the following three plotting coordinate systems.

Data	The coordinate system established by your data when you use a Plot, Contour, or Surface command. This is the default coordinate system for most of the IDL graphics commands.
Device	The physical coordiante system of the graphics device. It ranges from 0 to the number of addressable rows and columns on the graphics display. Device coordinates are usually thought of as pixels. This is the default for the TV and TVScl commands.
Normal	The normalized coordinate system. It ranges from 0 to 1 in the plot window.

The type of coordinate system is usually specified using keywords to the various graphic display commands:

xyouts, x, y, 'Sin(s)', /normal
cursor, x, y, /device

Displaying Data as a Line Plot

To general a line plot, one would use the plot procedure. The plot procedure can take one or two arguments. IDL will try to create the best plot with the information at hand, and it will automatically scale the plotting ranges. For example:

IDL> num = findgen(40)*10
IDL> line=sin(num*!DtoR)
IDL> plot, line

IDL will generate a plot using the x indices as the independent variable index, and the values in x as the dependent values.

You can provide a second argument to the plot command.

IDL> plot, num, line

Customizing your plots

To customize your plots, you can use the keywords associated with the plot procedure (you can find more about the keywords from the online help browser). Here are a few things you can do:

• change the color of the plots
• change the fonts
• change the size of the annotation
• change the line style connecting the plotting symbols
• use different plotting symbols, or create your own
• change the thickness of lines on the plot
• change the length of tick marks
• set the range of data on the axes to plot a subset of the data
• change the style of the plot
• annotate the tick marks
• specify the number of tick intervals

For example, if you want to use a different symbol:

IDL> plot, num, line, psym = 1

Choosing a Line Style

You can choose a different line style by using the LineStyle keyword.

IDL> plot, num, line, linestyle = 1

The table below summarizes the different type of line styles.

You can also change the line thickness by using the Thick keyword.

IDL> plot, num, line, linestyle=2, thick=3

Choosing a Plotting Symbol

You can choose a different plotting symbol by using the PSym keyword.

IDL> plot, num, line, psym=1

The table below summarizes the different type of symbols.

Using a negative value for the psym keyword will connect your symbols with lines.

IDL> plot, num, line, psym=-1

This will connect the plus signs with lines.

Creating your own plotting symbols

You can use the UserSym procedure to create your own symbol. The symbol you created can be used by setting the psym keyword to 8. Here is an example that creates a circle. The following steps first generate the data points for the circle, and then the usersym procedure is called to create the circle symbol.

IDL> n = 17.0 ; the circle will be "created" with 17 data points (vertices)
IDL> theta = findgen(n)/(n-1.0)*360.0*!DtoR ;
IDL> x = 1.0*sin(theta)
IDL> y = 1.0*cos(theta)
IDL> usersym, x, y

So now you can use the circle symbol by:

IDL> plot, num, line, psym = 8

Finally, you can change the size of the symbol by using the SymSize keyword:

IDL> plot, num, line, psym = 8, symsize = 2.0

Annotating your plots

When you look at the online help, you will notice that there are many keywords associated with the plot command. The table below lists a selected few to illustrate what you can used to annotate your plots. You should try to experiment with the various keywords available for the plot procedure.

CharSize	The overall character size for the annotation. The character sizes for the different axes are scaled from this value. The main title is scaled to 1.25 times this size. A CharSize of 1.0 is normal size. IDL> plot, num, line, charsize=2.0, title='GHRS spectrum
[XYZ]CharSize	The character sizes for the annotation on the individual axes. The value of this keyword is used to scale the value set by the keyword CharSize. IDL> plot, num, line, charsize=2.0, xcharsize=0.8, xtitle='wavelength'
Title	Places a title above the plot. IDL> plot, num, line, title='GHRS spectrum'
[XYZ]Title	The title for each individual axis. IDL> plot, num, line, xtitle='wavelength'
SubTitle	Place a subtitle underneath the X axis.
[XYZ]TickName	A string array of up to 30 elements containing the labels for major tick marks.

Exercise

Using what you have learned here, try to modify your plot of the GHRS spectrum. Also, try to incorporate the changes into your plotting program.