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

Using Unicode characters [new]


A new feature in gnuplot 4.4 allows you to use the Unicode character set in your graph's title and labels. This is a vast improvement over more cumbersome methods of entering special characters, but it does not work on all terminals. For example, PostScript does not support Unicode directly, but some implementations of the pdf and png terminals, and others, will work. The following example was created using the pngcairo version of the png terminal. Which versions you have available will depend on the details of your operating system and gnuplot installation. A more general method for creating complex labels is given in the next recipe.

Getting ready

You will need some method of inputting Unicode characters. There are myriad ways of doing this, depending on your operating system, terminal program, text editor, and so on, and the details are beyond the scope of this book. In order to create the title for this example, incorporating the name of a famous Viking scientist...