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

Creating a cumulative distribution [new]


In this recipe, we show how to use another useful statistical plot hiding away in the smoothing options, and also new to gnuplot in version 4.4. The curve plotted in the next figure is closely related to the one plotted in the previous recipe. To get the following figure, just integrate the frequency distribution curve:

Getting ready

Make sure you are in a directory with the supplied datafile called randomnormal.text.

How to do it…

The following script will get you the previous figure:

set key top left
plot 'randomnormal.text' using 1:(.001) smooth cumul \
      title "Cumulative distribution"

How it works…

The normalization issues are the same as the kdensity discussion in the previous recipe. The only difference here is the choice of smooth cumul—an abbreviation for cumulative. We can verify that we have a properly normalized curve because it approaches 1 as we approach the endpoint on the right. This is what we should expect, because this curve gives...