Grace can be downloaded from the Grace homepage.

Grace is a powerful 2D plotting tool with a very clean interface. It can output to multiple file formats (.eps, .pdf, .png). It is the easiest and best tool to produce 2D plots for presentation and publication.

The Grace user guide and tutorial are good starting points to learn the basics of using Grace.

\n	new line
\u	begin underline
\U	stop underline
\o	begin overline
\O	stop overline
\q	begin italics
\Q	stop italics
\s	begin subscripting
\S	begin superscripting
\N	return to normal style
\x	switch to Symbol font
\f{}	return to normal font
\c	begin using upper 128 characters of set
\C	stop using upper 128 characters of set

Grace is able to typeset a limited amount of symbols through changing the font:

There are a few different types of line styles in Grace. I suggest not using more than 3 or 4 different line styles in a plot. The ones I suggest are the full line, the dotted line, the wider dashed line, and the wider dot-dashed line if you really need a fourth style.

Please remember that a line through your data points is not always needed. For certain types of plots, the “None” line type is the appropriate choice.

The default line width is 1, this is okay for informal printouts. However, for publication and presentations, I recommend a line width between 3 and 5. Line width can also be used to differentiate between data sets. However, I recommend keeping the line width consistent in a plot unless special attention needs to be brought to a certain data set or if a data set is sufficiently different from all others.

Grace offers a wide variety of default colors to use. Please do not use them all. From the default set, I suggest using black, red, blue, orange, and green4 for presentations.

Publications (and informal printouts) require a bit more thought. Since even though the paper will be in color online, you may still want to make sure the colors are distinct when printed in black and white. I recommend black, red, and brown (though custom colors may be better, see below).

Colorblindness may be something else to consider. It certainly makes it more complicated since there are different types of colorblindness. You can use this site to do a quick check of colors if you need to.

Overall, I don't recommend too many colors, and I certainly don't recommend putting a full rainbow into any plot. Of course, you can also add in your own colors (RGB format) by editing the .agr file. It's near the top of the file, “@map color”. Custom colors that seem okay are:

@map color 0 to (255, 255, 255), "white"
@map color 1 to (0, 0, 0), "black"
@map color 2 to (0, 70, 170), "blue2"
@map color 3 to (0, 150, 50), "green2"
@map color 4 to (255, 180, 0), "orange2"
@map color 5 to (100, 0, 100), "maroon2"

There are quite a few symbols to use for Grace plots. I recommend using Circle, Square, Diamond, and Triangle up. Plus, X, and Star can also be used in their own set. Char allows the use of a character as a symbol and may be useful in special situations.

The symbol size is very dependent on what you want to show. I don't think there is a general suggestions. You should look over the plot to see if the size is appropriate for the medium (Paper, presentation, or other).

I recommend using filled symbols and unfilled symbols with width of 2 or 3. As with the line style, it is not always necessary to use a symbol for each data set. If you are using both a symbol and a line for a data set, I recommend using the same color for both.

The default Times-Roman should be a good font for almost all plots. The main suggestion is to use a font size that is appropriate. The default “char size” is 100, this is not large enough if you want to shrink the plot down for publication or for use in a presentation. For a square plot of 8“ by 8”, I suggest a “char size” of 150 for publication figures (shrinking down to 3“ width). For presentations, I suggest 175 or even 200.