Plot drawing software Could you please recommend me software for drawing plots? I need something like the Grapher application that is included with Mac OS X but with these functions:


Axis naming
Error bars
Advanced working with input datasets(I need to plot data from physics labs)


For reference by default Grapher is installed in /Applications/Utilities/
It's tough to tell precisely what you're after.  Perhaps you could give an example of what you're looking for.

My first response is to recommend that you look into R http://www.r-project.org/ and some of the GUIs based on it.  It's quickly becoming a standard in any field requiring statistical analysis, from quantitative finance, to medicine, to social sciences.

It has a hideous programming language but a huge package archive http://cran.r-project.org/.  I would recommend poking around the statistics stack exchange site for pointers, but some notable GUIs include RapidMiner (http://rapid-i.com/content/view/181/190/), RStudio (New and just getting out of the gate, so don't expect a lot right now http://www.rstudio.org/), Red-R (http://www.red-r.org/), R Commander (http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Misc/Rcmdr/), and Rattle (http://rattle.togaware.com/).  R is also integrated in SAGE, with which you may already be familiar.  One huge benefit of R is Sweave, which allows integration with LaTeX, so your papers can render your data and publication at the same time.

If you just want a graphing solution, WaveMetrics IGOR (http://www.wavemetrics.com/) is probably the best bet.  It's available on Windows and Mac OS so you can share files with other people fairly easily.

KaleidaGraph (http://www.synergy.com/) and pro Fit (http://www.quansoft.com/) are notable options as well.

One of the secrets you'll find out when hanging out on various visualization forums, especially Edward Tufte's (http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a?topic_id=1), is that a large number of the published graphs (especially his) often start in Excel and are exported to be manipulated in Adobe Illustrator.  You may have a graph in mind that comes from this pipeline, which has a large manual effort but a magnificent potential output.  I've also done similar with Mathematica (my tool of choice) when needing print-quality output.