Re: [Gnuplot-info] pm3d with sparse data

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Lawrence Murray wrote:

> Thanks for your response. I appreciate what you're saying, but the 
> distributions I'm dealing with by nature consist of finely separated 
> sharp peaks, such that the high-res binning is required to discriminate 
> them. 

I have to disagree.  The way you describe your data, what is required to 
display them is peak finding, not binning.  You obviously want to 
display the position of those peaks, not their height.  A colour map is 
rather certainly not the best way of displaying such data.

> Perhaps I wasn't clear also, the data files I'm working with are 150 KB 
> at most, it's only when padding them with zeros to give a dense grid 
> structure for gnuplot that they become unwieldy, up to 250 MB. It's 
> rather like sparse vs dense matrix representations.

To arrive a 250 MB, you would have to blow up the x and y resolution of 
those meshes to upward of 2000x2000 points.  That's plainly unplottable 
--- your entire screen doesn't have that many pixels, not even to begin 
with the actual reslution of human eyesight.  You're on an impossible 
mission there, trying to display data with more x and y resolution than 
can possibly fit on your screen.

Colour-coded impulses or points would make a lot more sense for this 
data set.  There's nothing smooth or continuous about it.  We're talking 
about a bed-of-nails here.