I am away from my regular computer on and off. So my responses can be slow at the moment.

I posted some reports asking about chart generation programs to a number of computer language newsgroups. And somewhere in the responses there was a mention of Gnuplot. It took a while to determine that you can simply download a .zip version of the program, decompress it, and store the results somewhere. Then you just start the .exe program.

It is easy to download get running (once you determine what needs to be done) and easy to use. And it works great. Plots are really fast. After some experimentation I believe I have been able to determine how to link it effectively and efficiently with Perl and other data generation programs that can respond to a key being pressed while Gnuplot is the active window. I don't know if TrueBasic can do that. That should then enable users to have Perl (or whatever) send new chart data to the plotting program in response to left or right arrow keys etc. And the charts will look like they are scrolling to the left or right or zooming in, zooming out etc. That "realtime" feature is something that is important in addition to the powerful plotting routines.

Because it is a standalone chart generation program it should be possible for people using different programs such as Perl or TrueBasic to generate forecasting data and then use shared Gnuplot routines to plot the results on world maps etc., another important feature.

It required a fair amount of time and energy to learn about the existence of the program. It was not an easy effort by any means. And I still need to determine how to generate standalone .exe files for Perl. On the positive side, these things only need to be done once.