Evaluation of Graphics Packages for PCs

Abstract

This report is a modification of an internal report produced for the Computing Services Department at The University of Liverpool. The report is being modified for external consumption and published by AGOCG since it has relevance to many sites in the HE community.

The report contains the results of an evaluation of some technical graphing packages available for Windows NT. The packages considered were Deltagraph, Origin, Sigmaplot and Grapher. Our intention in carrying out the evaluation was to provide a quality 32-bit package for our new NT service.

From the study, we concluded that Origin was the best choice overall for our purposes but we note that, presently, its educational price is almost prohibitively high for supporting large numbers on a network.

We found that Deltagraph, although rich in features, had several serious drawbacks in the NT environment and that Sigmaplot and Grapher were limited in certain areas of functionality.

CONTENTS

Abstract
Background to Evaluation
Candidates for Evaluation