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 on subintervals


gnuplot has built-in a respectable collection of special functions and mathematical operators that allow us to perform significant calculations and massaging of data before plotting. A complete survey of gnuplot's math brain is beyond the scope of this book; interested readers should start with Chapter 13 of the official reference manual distributed with the program and available at http://gnuplot.info/documentation.html.

Here, we shall merely give an example of one very useful technique for plotting functions that have different definitions over different domains; this technique works equally well for functions that are continuous or discontinuous over the entire plotting domain. The example will demonstrate several of gnuplot's mathematical facilities that have not been covered up to now. Following figure is a plot of two functions, a simple sine wave that turns into a decaying sine wave when we cross x = 0:

How to do it…

The following script will produce the previous...