Tips for Xmgrace

General Information

 * User Guide
 * Xmgrace Forum

Editing

 * Beware: there is no Undo option but Reverse to saved so it is better to often save your working document.
 * copy-paste within different boxes does not seem to be possible, one can open a terminal for temporary paste.

General parametrization of the software
create the file ~/.grace/gracerc.user and enter your device parameters.

Example : setting default printing to the .eps format : add the following line HARDCOPY DEVICE "EPS"

Creating a default template graph used when opening xmgrace
A simple way to customize Xmgrace is to use a default template .agr file that you can save in the directory (create it if it does not exist)

~/.grace/templates/Default.agr

Changing colors in Xmgrace
The color maps in a ".agr" file are defined at the beginning using the following syntaxe @map color number to (R,G,B), "colorname" where R,G,B and the usual integers from 0 to 255 of the RGB code.

It is highly recommended not to change the first two colors (black&white) as they are used as default parameters in many places. Keep @map color 0 to (255, 255, 255), "white" @map color 1 to (0, 0, 0), "black"

For others, you can add/change colors and colornames. The color number matters when you use set different colors for instance.

In order to automatically generate some gradients, you can find on the page generating color palette for Xmgrace little script that produce the sequences for a given number of curves. Here are some of the results:



Manipulating data

 * functions available
 * you can directly access data of set sn via sn.y and sn.x

Useful inline commands and aliases

 * grabbing data from pipe

alias xmlog='xmgrace -log xy' alias xmlogy='xmgrace -log y' alias xmlogx='xmgrace -log x' alias xmbar='xmgrace -settype xydy' alias xmlogbar='xmgrace -log xy -settype xydy' alias xmlogybar='xmgrace -log y -settype xydy'
 * Some bash aliases (or command lines) for defining axis and data type

Typography
Ctrl-e and then choose your token and press Apply. It will insert the chosen token in your current text line.
 * when typing in a text, you can invoke the Font-Tool application by pressing

\0 Times-Roman \1 Times-Italic \2 Time-Bold \3 Time-BoldItalic \4 Helvetica \5 Helvetica-Oblique \6 Helvetica-Bold \7 Helvetica-BoldOblique \f{} get back to original font \x Symbol (in particular Greek letters) \+ increase size \- decrease size \b backspace (size of previous character) \u begin underline \U stop underline \s subscript \S superscript \N normal \n newline \o begin overline \O end overline
 * Shortcuts for \f{Police} (have to check this)
 * Shortcuts for text manipulation (From Grace guide)


 * Useful examples:

Inserting Latex Formulas in eps
There are two main options : either use Inkscape which can generate Latex formula for graphics or use psfrag and Latex to produce another .eps file. For this second option, you can find further information here.