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

Handling volatile data [new]


Older versions of gnuplot ran into a problem when dealing, for example, with datafiles whose content is subject to change. When using gnuplot to examine such volatile data interactively, we might want to zoom in or out, or add a title to the plot to prepare it for saving. The problem is that each of these operations either requires an explicit call to replot or, in the case of mouse operations, calls it implicitly. And when the replot command is issued, the datafile is read anew, and the new data is plotted. What if we want to manipulate the plot while retaining the data already read in?

The new features in gnuplot version 4.4 for dealing with volatile data were added with these issues in mind.

How to do it…

The volatile data source

In order to play with this feature, it is convenient to have some volatile data available. If you run the following Python program, supplied as the code sample randomnormalIntervals.py, in the background, it will make a datafile and replace...