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I have some graphs I drew in maple, some simple line plots and histograms. Now I'd like to redraw these graphs in LaTeX, so I can do fancy stuff in beamer like have one histogram appear, and then another on top of it on the next slide.

I guess one way to do this would be using R and sweave, but learning R seems like overkill, since I'm not really doing any statistical analysis: I just want to plot some data. Is there a simpler way to pass LaTeX the data in such a way that it will be able to plot the data in, say, a TikZ picture (since I already know how to use TikZ a bit...)

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3 Answers

up vote 15 down vote accepted

The pgfplots package might be what you need. It is based on Tikz, and lets you plot data or functions.

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OK, pgfplots looks nice, is there an easy way to input data from an external source? Or should I just export the data as CSV and \input that? – Seamus Aug 27 '10 at 14:15
I've haven't used it much myself, and not for that purpose, but look at the manual, sections 4.2.2 and 4.2.3 ("Reading coordinates from files" and "Reading Coordinates From Tables"). – Torbjørn T. Aug 27 '10 at 15:19
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pfgplots happily reads from external data files. The manual has a number of examples. – Joseph Wright♦ Aug 27 '10 at 16:01
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pstricks extension and more specifically pst-plot package pst-plot guide may be a good solution as well. It is also a bit problematic if you use the pdflatex engine but works very well with dvips and ps2pdf.

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A half hour spent learning R is all you'll need. If you can work in maple, you'll find R to be simple. The good thing is that R and maple do quite different things, so time spent learning a bit of R will not be lost time. If you do any work with data, R is a tool you should investigate.

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But I wouldn't be able to use R to generate the data, right? (I was using Maple to iterate the logistic map and create time series from that...) – Seamus Sep 11 '10 at 11:38
Sorry, your original post ("I just want to plot some data") suggested that you have the data in a file, and wanted to read the file and plot it using latex. I don't know much about regenerating data in latex, but I know for sure that you could do such a thing in R. I think you should google "cran logistic map" and start reading what you get. If you need a quick solution, of course the best plan is to make Maple create a graph, and use includegraphics{} in latex to typeset it. That is the normal way to do things. – dank Sep 14 '10 at 10:48

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