Book Image

gnuplot Cookbook

By : Lee Phillips
Book Image

gnuplot Cookbook

By: Lee Phillips

Overview of this book

gnuplot is the world's finest technical plotting software, used by scientists, engineers, and others for many years. It is in constant development and runs on practically every operating system, and can produce output in almost any format. The quality of its 3d plots is unmatched and its ability to be incorporated into computer programs and document preparation systems is excellent. gnuplot Cookbook ñ it will help you master gnuplot. Start using gnuplot immediately to solve your problems in data analysis and presentation. Quickly find a visual example of the graph you want to make and see a complete, working script for producing it. Learn how to use the new features in gnuplot 4.4. Find clearly explained, working examples of using gnuplot with LaTeX and with your own computer programming language. You will master all the ins and outs of gnuplot through gnuplot Cookbook. You will learn to plot basic 2d to complex 3d plots, annotate from simple labels to equations, integrate from simple scripts to full documents and computer progams. You will be taught to annotate graphs with equations and symbols that match the style of the rest of your text, thus creating a seamless, professional document. You will be guided to create a web page with an interactive graph, and add graphical output to your simulation or numerical analysis program. Start using all of gnuplot's simple to complex features to suit your needs, without studying its 200 page manual through this Cookbook.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
gnuplot Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Finding Help and Information
Index

Plotting multiple histograms


Rather than stacking the histograms, you can plot them side by side. The following figure shows the same data as in the previous plot, but has two separate sets of histograms plotted beside each other:

To make room, the histogram boxes are automatically drawn thinner. The different data sets are distinguished by different fill colors or patterns, depending on terminal, and/or different styles for the lines delineating the histogram boxes.

Getting ready

We are going to continue to wear out our datafile parabolaCircles.text.

How to do it…

Following are the commands used to produce a multiple histogram plot:

set style fill solid 1.0 border lt -1
set style data histograms
plot [0:40] 'parabolaCircles.text' using (-$2),\'' using (20*$3) notitle

How it works…

The shrewd reader will have noticed that this is the same recipe as the previous one, with the line set style histogram rowstacked removed. Here, we see the default multiple histogram style.