Overview

Used in the simplest way ``Robot;SPMquot; will produce good looking graphs from a data file with the minimum of user interaction. However, by using other commands more sophisticated plots may be produced. A number of data analysis utilities are also included, these include things such as fitting functions, folding data, period searching, and data manipulation (functions and arithmetic). Different text fonts, styles, line thicknesses, and colors can be used. Examples of the uses of Robot can be found in the ``Demos'' directory. The program stores commands you give it and these may be saved in a user specified file (the default name is robotlog.rob) and can store results (e.g. coefficients of fitted polynomials) in a file with the default name of robot.inf.

The resulting plot can be written as a PostScript file for subsequent printing on a laser printer, emailing to a friend etc. The quality of this plot is naturally better than is displayed on the screen. It includes the color information and the output can be either formatted for printing in landscape or portrait mode.

Robot is written in a mixture of 'C' and FORTRAN and presently uses the XView toolkit for its graphical user interface. The feasibility of replacing this with Java is being investigated. The presently maintained version runs on Sun workstations. LINUX systems, and Alphas. Installation instructions are found in the ``README'' file distributed with the source code.

<#14#>If you wish to reference Robot you may cite
Corbet, R.H.D., Larkin, C., Nousek, J.A., Proceedings of ``Astronomical Data Analysis and Software Systems'', Tucson, November, 1991. Astronomical Society of the Pacific Conference Series, 1992, Vol. 25, 106. (ISBN 0-937707-44-9)
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