Free software helps map and display data

TLDR

Creating camera‑ready figures is a tedious, largely manual process that most scientists perform, and commercial or in‑house software typically covers only part of the workflow. The authors introduce GMT, a free, public‑domain software package designed to streamline the creation of camera‑ready figures from raw data to final illustrations. GMT is a set of self‑contained UNIX tools that generate PostScript files—device‑independent, high‑resolution images—by combining line drawings, bitmaps, and text, and is fully documented and freely distributed.

Abstract

When creating camera‐ready figures, most scientists are familiar with the sequence of raw data → processing → final illustration and with the spending of large sums of money to finalize papers for submission to scientific journals, prepare proposals, and create overheads and slides for various presentations. This process can be tedious and is often done manually, since available commercial or in‐house software usually can do only part of the job. To expedite this process, we introduce the Generic Mapping Tools (GMT), which is a free, public domain software package that can be used to manipulate columns of tabular data, time series, and gridded data sets and to display these data in a variety of forms ranging from simple x‐y plots to maps and color, perspective, and shaded‐relief illustrations. GMT uses the PostScript page description language, which can create arbitrarily complex images in gray tones or 24‐bit true color by superimposing multiple plot files. Line drawings, bitmapped images, and text can be easily combined in one illustration. PostScript plot files are device‐independent, meaning the same file can be printed at 300 dots per inch (dpi) on an ordinary laserwriter or at 2470 dpi on a phototypesetter when ultimate quality is needed. GMT software is written as a set of UNIX tools and is totally self contained and fully documented. The system is offered free of charge to federal agencies and nonprofit educational organizations worldwide and is distributed over the computer network Internet.