Chapter 4 PHILOSOPHY

TOPDRAWER is designed to plot and manipulate data. It assumes that data consists of X vs Y with errors DX, DY. It may be X,Y vs Z with errors DX,DY,DZ. You may also specify NDX,NDY or NDZ the negative part of the error bars separately from DX,DY or DZ. The data may be a histogram in which case DX would be the bin width, or it may be a set of discrete points with unrelated errors. You may plot the data accordingly. There is also an auxiliary set of coordinates, that may be used for data manipulation, but not plotting. They are U,DU,NDU,V,DV,NDV,W,DW,NDW To plot the data in these coordinates they must be moved to X,Y,Z coordinates. This is easily done with the SWAP command. The basic plotting operations are: 1. PLOT plots the data with optional error bars. 2. JOIN joins the data points with line segments. 3. HISTOGRAM plot the data as a histogram. 4. BAR plots the data as a bar chart (similar to a histogram)