PSPlt

PSPlt is a lightweight plotting library designed to generate publication-quality plots from numerical data. The project focuses on deterministic rendering, reproducibility, and compact vector graphics, with primary output formats including PostScript and PDF.

Key features include support for common plot types such as line, scatter, bar, and area plots; error bars and fill regions; customizable axes, tick marks, labels, and legends; math text rendering; and simple annotations. It can read data from text files or use in-memory arrays and supports batch rendering for reproducible figures.

PSPlt is built around a small core rendering engine and a data model that describes figures as a scene graph. The API is designed to be language-neutral, with a C library at the core and optional bindings for higher-level languages such as Python and Lua. The design emphasizes minimal dependencies and straightforward integration into C/C++ applications and publication workflows.

Usage generally involves creating a figure, adding one or more plots, configuring visual options, and rendering to a file. The output is suitable for inclusion in scholarly articles and presentations and can be embedded in LaTeX documents via standard includegraphics workflows.

A permissive open-source project, PSPlt aims to serve researchers and educators who value reproducible, programmatic plot generation. It is commonly discussed alongside other plotting tools such as Gnuplot, Matplotlib, and PLplot.