For some time I've been pondering ways of plotting up time series over
days / months. Many plotting packages (e.g. gnuplot) provide special
options for time series so you can format the axis labels in a human
dd/mm type format for example. Plplot currently has no such facility.
This has been brought up on the list before. It is also something I'd
personally find useful in my work.
What I am thinking about is adding a new (x|y)opt flag for plaxes, perhaps
'T'. This would interpret the corresponding axis as a time. The format
of the time would be determined using a new function, perhaps pltimefmt
which would allow you to specify the time format,
e.g. pltimefmt("%H:%d")
would format the labels as hour:minute. I would suggest adopting the
format used by strftime. This function is relatively standard (it is
in SVr4, C89 and C99) and would make a good basis for the formatting
routine. Again, there is the question of how a time should be
represented. I would suggest interpreting the data as seconds since 1st
Jan 1970 (the usual standard).
Any comments?
Andrew
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