Graphics

RATS has four main instructions for creating graphs:

•GRAPH creates time series plots, or, more generally, plots of a series which is arranged as a sequence. The Data/Graphics—Graph wizard generates a GRAPH instruction. You can produce line graphs, filled line graphs, several types of bar graphs, and high-low-close graphs.

•SCATTER creates scatter (x vs. y) plots. In addition to series vs. series, it does graphs where the x axis is a grid on the real line, either equally or unequally spaced. The Data/Graphics—Scatter(X-Y) wizard generates a SCATTER instruction.

•GCONTOUR produces contour plots.

•GBOX produces box (or “box and whisker”) plots.

These are very flexible instructions which allow you to create a wide variety of graphs. The auxiliary instructions SPGRAPH, GRTEXT, and GRPARM further enhance the abilities. With RATS, you can:

•use color, dashed line patterns, or shades of gray to distinguish series (these are called "styles"). RATS can automatically translate color into patterns or grayscale for output to black and white printers.

•highlight either ranges (with shading) or specific values/entries (with lines)

•generate a graph with series having different scales (which we refer to as “overlay graphs”) using a single GRAPH or SCATTER instruction. The overlay options also allow you to mix different styles on a single graph. For example, you could plot one series as a line and another using a bar-graph style.

•create pages of equally sized “postage-stamp” graphs. This is done using SPGRAPH.

•add explanatory text within the graph, done with GRTEXT.

•use graph style definitions to control the color and thickness of lines, choose from a range of fill patterns for bar graphs, and more.

•change fonts and font sizes, done with GRPARM.

In RATS, graphics generally works through Graph Windows, though you can also save graphs directly using the GSAVE instruction. Graph Windows are, not surprisingly, windows used to display graphs. Each graph generated gets its own window. You may note that Graph Windows have relatively few “toolbar” icons. With RATS, you create the appearance that you want using the graphics commands, rather than adding them (manually) afterwards. This gives you graphs that are perfectly reproducible.

Programs can sometimes generate a large number of graphs. To reduce clutter, you might want to minimize graphs that you don’t need to look at right now (but want to keep available)—you can always reload them from the Window menu. There’s also a Window—Close All Graphs which will close (permanently) all the current graph windows.