Automating Plotting

[DaveBarnett]

The current project on which I’m working has involved doing quite a lot of PMAC data gathering and plotting for diagnostic purposes.  Sometimes many dozens of plots per day.  So, I was wondering about automating this with some sort of batch process.  Among the things I’d like to automate would include:

• Data gathering of various select items
• Printing PDF’s of the resulting data 
• Time stamping
• Collecting meta data from the resultant plots
• Writing data out to network drives

 

I know about scripting the gather engine…and that works fine.  But, are there any clean ways to automate the plot program?  I suppose one approach might be to use Python and one of its graphing libraries to automate things…but, seems like a lot of work.  

Anybody solved this already ??  ‘Would be interesting in hearing about the strength and weaknesses of various approaches.

Thanks in advance!