VMS ECP - convert CSV file to Post Script

[John Welsh_2]

Hi all,
I have a CPC file collected using EPC
on a VAX running VMS 7.1 and wish to convert to a suitable graph for a report. How do I convert the CPC ( or CSV ) to postscript ?
Thanks in advance, John W.
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[Jon Pinkley · Accepted solution]

John,

If this is a one-shot thing, then the following may be an acceptable work around.

If the CSV is somewhat standard, and you have a Windows PC with excel, you should be able to load into excel, use the chart wizard to create the graph you want, and print to a postscript print driver and select "print to file"

Here's a page that discusses that for windows.

http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~herzbea/makeP.htm

If that isn't what you are looking for, Google can probably find other options.

There is also the TlViz (TimeLine Visualizer) that is part of the T4 kit, but it expects a specific CSV format. There may be converters for EPC's CSV (if it is not compatible as generated). TlViz runs on a Windows PC.

If, on the other hand, you are generating these graphs on a nightly basis, then using excel isn't going to do what you want. I assume you want something similar to what was available with the Polycenter Performance Advisor, which had integrated postscript graph output.


You could probably create something using gnuplot. It can generate many different types of output. gnuplot doesn't understand CSV; you will have to somehow transform the data for it. With gnuplot and a pre-processor to convert the files into a format that gnuplot would accept, you could probably create the .ps file you want directly on the VMS system. However, I am not aware of anyone doing that and making his or her work available for download.

http://www.gnuplot.info/

http://www.gnuplot.info/faq/faq.html

There are several add-on packages, you then will need to possibly install some other stuff like Perl as well.

http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/qplot is a pre-processor to work with quarterly data, and may be something you could use as a starting point.

Jon

[Hoff]

The whole area is unfortunately and inexplicably nasty.

libcsv will let you read the file (and there are other tools to read the gazillion variant CSV formats; try not to roll your own), and you'll have to sort out available plotting tools for a Mac OS X or Linux or Microsoft Windows client of your own; the HP folks working on this stuff appear have various proprietary tool chains in mind for this data, and AFAIK OpenVMS isn't a target for these tool chains.

If you're hosting your processing on Microsoft Windows, you can load CSV into Office Excel or into OpenOffice.org suite, or on Mac OS X using Numbers or OpenOffice.org suite or NeoOffice, or on Linux using OpenOffice.org suite, and generate some graphs from there.

You're likely going to be rolling your own stuff if you're looking to be hosting this processing and this graphing on OpenVMS. libxml and whatever Perl or Python or other X-based plotting is available. AFAIK, the HP TLViz tool isn't open source, though there is a JTLviz Java variant available.

I could use a few more words around the background and goals and plans for your data to better tailor an answer.

[John Gillings]

John,

Look at T4 file format. If you have time line data, consisting of rows of data points collected at regular intervals, then it should be fairly easy to convert into a T4 CSV format.

You can then use TlViz for interactive analysis. But from what you've asked, I'd guess that CSVPNG is a better match for what you want. CSVPNG does batch generation of graphs in PNG form. Once you have PNG, I'm sure you can find a utility to convert it to postscript (though why you want postscript specifically is a mystery to me!)

On the data is in T4 format, CSVPNG can also be used to manipulate it, carving it up horizontally or vertically, extracting fields or regions of interest.

There are versions of CSVPNG for OpenVMS, Windows and a few other platforms.

[John Welsh_2]

Hi Guys,
Thanks for all your great responses.
I was a bit ahead of myself.
I have found that the "plan analyse/motif" gui has the option to print to a file, either creating a PS file or an XWD file.This is only a one-off project so I will create PS files and then use Distiller to create PDF's. I tried Ghostview and it looks very useful.
As usual this forum always has expert knowledge to solve our VMS problems.
Best Regards, John W.