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

Defining the tic values


This recipe will show you how to take a little more control over where the tics appear on your axes. The following figure illustrates one use of manually specified tic marks:

The previous figure is similar to the one towards the end of Chapter 1, Plotting Curves, Boxes, Points, and more, where we introduced polar coordinates. The difference here is that we have placed our tic marks only in a certain area—that you can imagine is a region of interest—and added grid lines so the reader can more easily extract quantitative information from the graph in the region.

How to do it…

Following is the script that produced the previous figure:

set xtics axis nomirror
set ytics axis nomirror
set zeroaxis
unset border
set polar
set samples 500
set grid
set xtics 15,2,30
set ytics 10,2,20
plot [0:12*pi] t

How it works…

The lines in the previous script until the highlighted lines are the same as in the Plotting with polar coordinates recipe towards the end of Chapter 1, Plotting Curves...