General tips

Visual presentation of data is extremely important because you can convey your findings in a concise manner. This is usually done with plots, where one set of data is plotted against the another. These plots could, be line plots, bar plots, scatter plots, surface plots or contour plots. One needs to keep several things in mind while dealing with plots. These points are listed here and you should follow these meticulously while you write your papers, thesis, synopsis etc.

• Make sure your plot never has any white spaces around it. It usually creates a problem when you want to center it in the document.
• All plots should be made with patience. No one can generate a publication quality plot in 10 minutes.
• As far as possible make sure the fonts of the text and that in the plot match.
• Name your plot files clearly so that you will know what it contains when you look at the file name
• The area the plot is going to occupy in the paper should be the canvas (where you draw the plot) size.
• Avoid color plots unless it is required. Use markers to differentiate various lines.
• Caption all figures properly and always refer to the figure in the text. This means there should be something you will talk in the text about the plot you made.
• Make sure all the figures for a particular document are in a folder called "Figures" or something similar. Having the document and the figures in the same folder creates clutter.

Plotting software

There are several softwares one can use to make plots. I recommend PGFPlots. You can learn the software by looking at this page and learn the details by reading the manual. With PGFPlots, you can:

• read a data file and plot
• manipulate the data from within the tex file to a certain extent
• control every single aspect of the plot
• make a matrix of plots with perfect spacing between them
• control the frequency with which markers are placed on the line plot, without having to regenerate data at a lower frequency
• make contour plots, bar plots, surface plots etc.
• no white space surrounding the plots
• plot with mathematical functions
• use arrows to annotate and show something in the plot
• the tex code of the plot can be placed inside a document. When this is done you can use \cite in that plot, to cite a paper. This comes in handy when you want to compare your plot with one from another paper.

While there is a learning curve associated with PGFPlots, it will really make your life easier later and you will enjoy plotting. Some typical tex files to make some common types of plots are given here for your reference. Feel free to modify them and use them for your work. Read the manual or use google search if you want to make other kinds of plots. For complicated plots involving contours/3D plotting I recommend using MATLAB. One has to however spend the required time it takes to make the figure look very good and publishable.

Other softwares for plotting

For quick viewing of results during your research, for group presentation or to discuss results with guide, using MATLAB or gnuplot (preferable) is alright. Please do not use Excel for data analysis and plotting unless you have only a few numbers to handle. Another interesting plotting(free) software is asymptote (see this document for a tutorial and this one for the official documentation) .