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

Adjusting the tic size


The default length gnuplot uses for tics is a little small, and makes the minor tics all but disappear on small plots. Naturally, the tic size can be adjusted at will. The following figure employs longer tic marks than we have seen so far:

How to do it…

Following is an example showing how to specify the length of the tic marks. The output of this script is the previous figure:

set tics scale 3
set mxtics 4
set mytics 4
plot [0:4*pi] sin(x)/x

How it works…

The first (highlighted) code line sets the length of the tic marks to be three times the default length. The actual length may vary somewhat between terminals, so you may need to experiment to get the exact effect that you desire.

There's more…

By default, gnuplot assigns a length to the minor tics that is one-half the length of the major tics, so in this case the minor tics have a scale of 1.5. If you want to set a different scale for the minor tics, the command becomes set tics scale a, b, where a is the scale for the...