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 labels from files


In Chapter 2, Annotating with Labels and Legends, we learned how to place a text label anywhere on the graph with the set label command. It is also possible to plot a set of labels whose text, positions, and possibly other attributes are derived from the information in a datafile. In this way, we can create visualizations such as the following:

The previous figure shows a collection of names of countries printed with a text size that is proportional to each country's population (aside from the practical requirement to impose a maximum and minimum font size). The labels are positioned to indicate each country's school intake rate in the first grade as a percentage of official school-age population versus the literacy rate for people in the age group 15-24. The data comes from the World Bank and can be found at http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/world-development-indicators. The numbers reported for 2009 are used, and all countries with data for that year are...