PLT is an interactive plotting program that is designed to be used by scientists analyzing data. QDP (the Quick and Dandy Plotter) is basically a program that reads ASCII files and then calls PLT.
To see all the available commands check out the PLT online help. To see recent changes in PLT check out the version information.
PLT is used by lextrct. The lextrct online help can be viewed here. To see recent changes lextrct check out the lextrct version information.
PLT is based upon the PGPLOT graphics library.
Take QDP out for a test drive now! There are now two Web interfaces to Web-QDP. The first, easy to use interface allows you to produce a plot by dropping in some data and filling in the blanks Web-QDP-EZ.
Or if you already know how to run QDP and want to skip those annoying blanks you can drop complete QDP files into Web-QDP-Expert.
Currently qdp and lextrct are distributed together. (If you don't want lextrct just skip the last two steps in the installation guide.) The total compressed tar file is about 1 MB (and so fits on a floppy). The installation guide gives detailed instructions on how to download and install the software. The actual tar file is located at lexsrc.tgz (you may need to right click on the file to download it).
To find out about X-ray astronomy at MSFC click here.Page Author: allyn.tennant at msfc.nasa.gov