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

Talking to gnuplot with C


In this and the next few recipes, we are going to demonstrate how to use gnuplot from within different programming languages. There are no illustrations for these recipes, as we are not giving examples of particular types of plots. We provide samples of code for several languages that you can modify to get started immediately incorporating gnuplot's plotting facilities into your programs.

The first example was chosen to demonstrate that we can use gnuplot from within almost any programming language, even if no specialized library exists for that purpose.

Getting ready

You need to have a C compiler installed to follow along here. Just about any Unix-type operating system, including Linux and Macintosh (if the Developer Tools have been installed) comes with one, and it is usually called gcc.

How to do it…

Compile the following program with gcc file.c, where file.c is the name of the file in which it is saved (the example distributed with this book that is named after...