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

Introduction


Up to now our style of interacting with gnuplot has mainly been to have an interactive conversation at the terminal, or to create a linear sequence of commands that can be read in and executed by typing gnuplot file. We went beyond this a bit in the previous chapter, where we learned how to arrange for a document preparation system to invoke gnuplot automatically. In this chapter, we shall learn how to leverage the full power of gnuplot as a programmable graphing engine. This is made possible by gnuplot's design as a program that can be completely controlled by textual commands, rather than by a limited graphical user interface. This means that any programming language that can send text to a process or socket can send commands to gnuplot. The result is that there are libraries for interfacing with gnuplot in almost every high-level programming or scripting language, and even in cases where no library is available it is straightforward to communicate manually from within your...