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

Formatting tic labels


gnuplot provides a great deal of flexibility in the formatting of numbers in tic labels and allows us to freely intermix text with its automatically generated numbers. This is illustrated in the following figure:

How to do it…

The following script introduces the formatting commands that we used to produce the previous figure:

set ylabel "Output power"
set format y "P = %.2f Watts"
set format x "%.3f%%"
set rmargin 6
plot [0:100] x**2

How it works…

The new commands are in the highlighted lines. set format y and set format x define the formats to be used for the tic labels on the y and x-axes, respectively. For a complete rundown of all the options, you can type help set format at the gnuplot interactive prompt. Here, we shall describe the subset of the formatting language that we used in the script. The codes are very similar to those used in many programming languages for the output formatting of numbers.

A formatting specification is introduced by the character %. It contains...