gnuplot faq
Contents
1. 5 6 How to use hotkeys in my interactive terminals 2 00000 5 7 Ihave ported gnuplot to another system or patched it What do I do 5 8 I want to help in developing the next version of gnuplot What canIdo 5 9 Open questions for inclusion into the FAQ 2 2 eee Making life easier 6 1 How do I plot two functions in non overlapping regions 20 6 2 How do I run my data through a filter before plotting 2 0 6 3 How do I save and restore my current settings 2 2 0 0020000000 6 4 How do I plot lines not grids using splot 2 ee ee 6 5 How do I plot a function f x y that is bounded by other functions in the x y plane 6 6 How do I call gnuplot from my own programs 2 2 00 ee ee 6 7 Whatif I need h bar Planck s constant 2 ee 6 8 What if I need the Solar mass symbol 00 0000 02 eee eee eee 6 9 How do I produce blank output page oaaae ee 6 10 How do I give exact positions for the graph borders on the page 2 20 Common problems 7 1 Help None of my fonts work o s aos m uci aci ee Sd Ce we ee ead 7 2 Gnuplot does not open a plot window on VMS Why 2 005 7 3 Why does gnuplot ignore my very small numbers 044 7 4 When I run gnuplot from the shell or a script the resulting plot flashes by on the screen and then disappears aoras coso ee eo eee Poe ae2. The authors of gnuplot are Thomas Williams Colin Kelley Russell Lang Dave Kotz John Campbell Gershon Elber Alexander Woo and many others The following quote comes from Thomas Williams 1 3 I was taking a differential equation class and Colin was taking Electromagnetics we both thought it d be helpful to visualize the mathematics behind them We were both working as sys admin for an EE VLSI lab so we had the graphics terminals and the time to do some coding The posting was better received than we expected and prompted us to add some albeit lame support for file data Any reference to GNUplot is incorrect The real name of the program is gnuplot You see people use Gnuplot quite a bit because many of us have an aversion to starting a sentence with a lower case letter even in the case of proper nouns and titles gnuplot is not related to the GNU project or the FSF in any but the most peripheral sense Our software was designed completely independently and the name gnuplot was actually a compromise I wanted to call it Ilamaplot and Colin wanted to call it nplot We agreed that newplot was acceptable but we then discovered that there was an absolutely ghastly pascal program of that name that the Computer Science Dept occasionally used I decided that gnuplot would make a nice pun and after a fashion Colin agreed What does gnuplot offer Plotting two dimensional functions and data points in many different styles poi
3. 6 6 sin x gnuplot gt set terminal postscript Terminal type set to postscript Options are landscape monochrome Courier 14 gnuplot gt set output sin ps gnuplot gt replot gnuplot gt unset output set output back to default gnuplot gt unset terminal ditto for terminal type gnuplot gt system print sin ps print PS File site dependent gnuplot gt Using the platform independent way of restoring terminal by set term push pop commands do it by gnuplot gt set terminal postscript eps color lw 15 Helvetica 20 gnuplot gt set out a eps gnuplot gt replot gnuplot gt set term pop The command set term pop without a previous corresponding set term push switches the terminal back to the startup terminal The same thing happens if you say unset terminal Some interactive terminal types win wxt gt provide a printer icon on the terminal s toolbar This tool prints the current plot or saves it to file using generic system tools rather than by using a different gnuplot terminal type That is the file you get by selecting save to png in the print menu will be different than the file you get from set term png replot 3 3 How do I include my graphs in lt word processor gt Basically you save your plot to a file in a format your word processor can understand using set term and set output see above and then you read in the plot from your word processor Vector formats PostScript emf svg
4. that is bounded by other functions in the x y plane Here is one way lot gt f x nu 7 lot gt x u 3x u p y x 2 y 2 nup plot gt yu x x 2 plot gt yl x xx 2 nuplot gt set parametric plot gt set cont plot gt splot 0 1 0 1 u yl x u yu x u yl x u v x u yu x u yl x u v veagaQqggQgaQgaQqa 5 SG 6 6 How do I call gnuplot from my own programs On unix like systems commands to gnuplot can be piped via stdin Output from gnuplot s print command can be read via a named pipe On Windows due to the lacking standard input stdin in GUI programs you either need to use the console version gnuplot recommended or use wgnuplot_pipes which has an additional console window attached The old helper program pgnuplot is still included in the distribution package 6 7 What if I need h bar Planck s constant The most straightforward way is to use a UTF 8 font and type in the A character Unicode code point x210F directly This does not work in PostScript however so you must use approximations like 56 24 h or 8 Symbol 24 _ 14 h In the latter the a long one in Symbol is non spacing and 24 pt The 14 pt h is offset by an 8 pt space which is the space preceding the _ but smaller since it s written as a subscript But these don t look too much like the hbar we re used to since the bar is hori zontal instead of sloped I don t see a
5. collection of triangles made from a mesh of quadrangles that form the surface second as a collection of edges It then goes through all those edges checking what parts of them are not hidden behind any faces and draws those Consequently gnuplot won t draw your surface or 3D object as a virtual reality It works OK for set pm3d map but for true 3D you would be probably more happy writing a converter of your facets into a VRML file 3 15 Palette for printing my color map on color as well as black amp white printer Try set palette cubehelix 4 Wanted features 4 1 What s new in gnuplot 4 6 5 0 etc Too many things to list here Please refer to the NEWS file in the source distribution or the New features section in the gnuplot documentation 4 2 Does gnuplot support a driver for lt graphics format gt To see a list of the available graphic drivers for your installation of gnuplot type set term Some graphics drivers are included in the normal distribution but are not built by default If you want to use them you ll have to change file gnuplot src term h and recompile 4 3 Does gnuplot have hidden line removal Yes 4 4 Does gnuplot support bar charts histograms boxes Gnuplot supports various clustered and stacked histogram styles to display pretabulated data It also offers a few options for accumulating raw data into bins which can in turn be displayed as a bar chart See the documentation for smooth frequency
6. ee ee ee 6 2 8 How do I determine which options are compiled into gnuplot 6 3 Working with it 6 31 How do beethelp issue aaea ela dae baa we ee da ee ee ele ea 6 3 2 Howdol print out my graphs so ee ee eee eee ee ee kaa 6 3 3 How do I include my graphs in lt word processor gt 1 2 2 0 0 0002002 eee ee 7 3 4 How do I edit or post process a gnuplot graph 2 2 ee ee 7 3 5 How do I change symbol size line thickness and the like 2 0 8 36 Can lanimatemy sraphs aa sa ece Wee Pak we Mad Bad aed el we aw aa 8 3 7 How do I plot implicit defined graphs 2 ee eee 8 3 8 How to fill an area between twocurves oaaae ee 8 3 9 Pm3d splot from a datafile does not draw anything 2 2 00 8 3 10 Drawing 2D projection of 3D data s esaea pressa aaa eee 9 3 11 How to overlay dots points scatter plot onto a pm3d map surface 9 3 12 How to produce labeled contours s e os se eor PO ee Re ee Ee 9 3 13 How to overlay contour plot over pm3d map surface 2 00000 9 3 14 Color facets With PMs s i s ae g Go Bowe dee Ge ew Qh we we ew dod ane So 9 3 15 Palette for printing my color map on color as well as black amp white printer 2 10 4 Wanted features 4 1 What s new in gnuplot 4 6 5 0 etc 2 0 2 ee ee 4 2 Does gnuplot support a driver for lt graphics format gt 004 4 3 Does gnuplot have hidden line remo
7. table contour dat splot x x y y unset table Change single blank lines to double blank lines lawk NF lt 2 printf n print lt contour dat gt contourl dat Draw the plot reset set palette gray set palette gamma 2 5 set pm3d map set pm3d explicit splot x xty y with pm3d contourl dat with line 1t 1 rm contour dat contourl dat The last command deletes the two temporary files 3 14 Color facets with pm3d It is possible to draw colors facets of a 3D objects organized in such a file triangle 1 x0 yO z0 lt c0 gt xl yl zl lt c1 gt x2 y2 z2 lt c2 gt x2 y2 z2 lt c2 gt triangle 2 x y Z Notice the positioning single and double blank line lt c gt is an optional color Then plot it by either of splot s set pm3d set style data pm3d splot facets dat splot facets_with_color dat using 1 2 3 4 Note that you avoid surface lines by set style data pm3d or splot with pm3d In the above example pm3d displays triangles as independent surfaces They are plotted one surface after another as found in the data file Parts overlapping in 2D projection are overdrawn Gnuplot is not 3D modeling program Its hidden routines apply for points and lines but not for faces Without handling the data as a collection of faces there would be no surface anything could be hidden behind The hidden3d algorithm works by using the input data in two ways first to set up a
8. way to get that I tried using an accent character 264 in iso latin 1 encoding but I haven t found a way to scale and position the pieces correctly One more possibility would be 14 Symbol 10 14 h The reduced Planck s constant can be set very easily by using the AMS LaTeX PostScript fonts which are available from http Awww ams org tex amsfonts html also included in many LaTeX distributions Gnu plot see help fontpath and the PostScript interpreter usually Ghostscript have to know where the file msbm1l0 pfb or msbm10 pfa resides Use MSBM10 175 to produce hslash which isa h superimposed by a sloped bar The standard hbar horizontal bar has the octal code 176 Please note that h bar exists only as an italic type 6 8 What if I need the Solar mass symbol As with Planck s constant the most straightforward way is to use a UTF 8 font and type in the character Unicode code point x2299 circled dot operator directly The very similar glyph at code point x2609 sun may be even better but not many fonts have it 6 9 How doI produce blank output page Well you probably don t want a blank page but page with a just a title overprinting title in another graph in multiplot page reset unset xtics unset ytics unset border unset key set title Title on an empty page plot 0 1 2 15 6 10 How do I give exact positions for the graph borders on the page Specify the position o
9. 10 4 5 Does gnuplot support pie charts quarterly time charts Pie charts are sort of difficult in gnuplot but see http gnuplot sourceforge net demo circles html or have a look at http gnuplot tricks blogspot com 2009 08 pie charts entirely in gnuplot html The demo collection contains an example of a simple Gantt chart This capability is new in gnuplot version 5 4 6 Can I put multiple pages on one page Yes set multiplot 4 7 Does gnuplot support multiple y axes on a single plot Yes 2D plots can have separate x axes at the bottom x1 and top x2 and separate y axes at the left y1 and right y2 Version 5 offers a plot mode with parallelaxes that allows additional y axes to be defined 4 8 Can I put both commands and data into a single file Version 5 supports named blocks of data in here document format gnuplot gt SDATABLOCK lt lt EOD cats 4 2 dogs 1 4 EOD gnuplot gt plot DATABLOCK using 2 3 1 with labels Once the named block has been defined it can be used as many times as you like Data can also be provided in line as part of a plot command using the pseudo file plot In this case the data can only be used once gnuplot gt plot 11 24 3 9 e 4 9 Can I put Greek letters and super subscripts into my labels Most terminal types output device drivers support an enhanced text mode This lets you use sub and superscripts It also allows to use Greek letters and math symbols
10. ary releases for some platforms like OS 2 Windows or Macintosh Important note questions related to the development version should go to mailto gnuplot beta lists sourceforge net 2 4 How do I get gnuplot to compile on my system As you would any other installation Read the files README 1ST README and INSTALL e For Unix use configure or configure prefix HOME usr for an installation for a single user make and finally make install or make install strip the latter for smaller executables without debugging infor mation If you want to make a RPM package then replace the latest step by checkinstall or checkinstall make install strip supposing the package checkinstall on your machine e On Windows makefiles can be found in config mingw config msvc config watcom and config cygwin Update the options in the makefile s header and run the appropriate make tool in the same directory as the makefile Additional instructions can be found in the makefiles e For DOS if you are using bash and DJGPP you can just run djconfig sh e For other platforms copy the relevant makefile e g makefile os2 for OS 2 from config to src option ally update options in the makefile s header then change directory to src and run make 2 5 What documentation is there and how do I get it Full documentation is included in the source distribution Individual sections can be browsed from inside a gnuplot session by typing help keyword Look i
11. atchlevel 1 2 are typically released every six months The development version of gnuplot is currently 5 1 2 2 Where can I get gnuplot The best place to start is http www gnuplot info From there you find various pointers to other sites including the project development site on SourceForge http sourceforge net projects gnuplot The source distribution gnuplot 4 6 0 tar gz or a similar name is available from the official distribution site http sourceforge net projects gnuplot 2 3 Where can I get current development version of gnuplot The development version of gnuplot is available as a cvs source tree online for direct browsing from http sourceforge net projects gnuplot section CVS You can download all current sources according to the doc umentation therein for example by a sequence of commands like cvs d pserver anonymous gnuplot cvs sourceforge net cvsroot gnuplot login cvs z3 d pserver anonymous gnuplot cvs sourceforge net cvsroot gnuplot co P gnuplot or in bash export CVSROOT pserver anonymous gnuplot cvs sourceforge net cvsroot gnuplot cvs login cvs z3 checkout gnuplot Hit lt return gt when asked for a password Further before the configure command of gnuplot compilation phase you have to execute prepare to create the up to date configure files There are no official preliminary binary releases of gnuplot you have to compile it yourself However you may find unofficial bin
12. cellaneous 5 1 Pve found a bug what do I do First try to see whether it actually is a bug or whether it is a feature which may be turned off by some obscure set command Next see whether you have an old version of gnuplot if you do chances are the bug has been fixed in a newer release The CVS development version may already contain fixes for bugs reported since the release of the current version Before submitting a bug report please check whether the bug in question has already been fixed 12 If after checking these things you still are convinced that there is a bug proceed as follows If you have a fairly general sort of bug report posting to news comp graphics apps gnuplot is probably the way to go If you have investigated a problem in detail especially if you can provide a simple script that reproduces the error please upload it to the bug tracker at http sourceforge net p gnuplot bugs The tracker on sourceforge is for reporting bugs and collecting bug fixes that will appear in a subsequent release The news comp graphics apps gnuplot newsgroup will be more help for finding work arounds or actually solving gnuplot related problems If you do send in a bug report be sure and include the version of gnuplot including patchlevel as shown by the command show version long terminal driver operating system an exact description of the bug and input which can reproduce the bug Failure to indicate these details can render a
13. ctional models f1 and f2 covering two different portions of the domain gnuplot gt set autoscale x get x range from the data gnuplot gt plot data 100 0 f1 x 0 100 2 x 6 2 How do I run my data through a filter before plotting If your system supports the popen function as Unix does you should be able to run the output through another process for example a short awk program such as gnuplot gt plot lt awk print 1 3 2 file in The plot command is very powerful and is able to do some arithmetic on datafiles See help plot The above filtering works seamlessly under Unixes and OS 2 On Windows this is only supported by default in gnuplot version 5 but required a separate program wgnuplot_pipes in some earlier versions 6 3 How do I save and restore my current settings Use the save and load commands for this see help save and help load for details You can save the current terminal and restore it later without touching the filesystem by set term push and set term pop respectively 6 4 How do I plot lines not grids using splot If the data input to splot is arranged such that each line contains the same number of data points using blank lines as delimiters as usual splot will by default treat the data as describing a surface If you want to draw individual lines instead try some combination of unset surface set surface explicit plot nosurface 14 6 5 How do I plot a function f x y
14. d editing program to post process pixel graphics 3 5 How do I change symbol size line thickness and the like Gnuplot offers a variety of commands to set line and point properties including color thickness point shape etc The command test will display a test page for the currently selected terminal type showing the available pre defined combinations of color size shape etc You can use the command set linetype to change this or define additional combinations 3 6 Can I animate my graphs Only one gnuplot terminal type gif directly outputs an animated file set terminal gif animate delay lt time gt loop lt N gt optimize Have a look at http gnuplot sourceforge net demo animate html in the demo collection 3 7 How do I plot implicit defined graphs Implicit graphs or curves cannot be plotted directly in gnuplot However there is a workaround gnuplot gt An example Place your definition in the following line gnuplot gt f x y y x 2 tan y gnuplot gt set contour base gnuplot gt set cntrparam levels discrete 0 0 gnuplot gt unset surface gnuplot gt set table curve dat gnuplot gt splot f x y gnuplot gt unset table gnuplot gt plot curve dat w 1 The trick is to draw the single contour line z 0 of the surface z f x y and store the resulting contour curve to a gnuplot datafile 3 8 How to fill an area between two curves A plot with filled area between two give
15. e keywords Good starting points are plot and set Read the manual if you have it Look through the demo subdirectory it should give you some ideas Ask your colleagues the system administrator or the person who set up gnuplot If all these fail please upgrade to the newest version of gnuplot or urge your system administrator to do so Then post a question to news comp graphics apps gnuplot or send mail to the gatewayed mailing list mailto gnuplot info lists sourceforge net Please note that due to the overwhelming amount of spam it would otherwise receive you have to subscribe before you can post to it Subscription instructions are in the main gnuplot manual Do not forget to cite the version number and the operating system If you want to subscribe to the mailing list visit the URL http lists sourceforge net lists listinfo gnuplot info But please don t use the mailing list if you can read news comp graphics apps gnuplot directly If you post a question there it is considered good form to solicit e mail replies and post a summary 3 2 How do I print out my graphs The kind of output produced is determined by the set terminal command for example set terminal postscri will produce the graph in PostScript format Output can be redirected using the set output command As an example the following first plots a graph of sin x to the screen and then redraws that same plot as a PostScript output file gnuplot gt plot
16. ee oe ee ee AR EES 7 5 My formulas like 1 3 are giving me nonsense results What s going on 7 6 My output files are mcomplete s s es oc bee ea eee ew ed ed 7 7 When using the IAT EX terminal there is an error during the MIgX run 2 2 7 8 Calling gnuplot in a pipe or with a gnuplot script doesn t produce a plot 8 Credits 10 10 10 10 10 11 11 11 11 11 11 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 13 13 13 13 14 14 14 14 14 14 14 14 14 15 15 15 15 15 16 16 16 16 17 17 17 17 17 18 18 0 Meta Questions 0 1 Where do I get this document The newest version of this document is on the web at http Awww gnuplot info faq 0 2 Where do I send comments about this document Send comments suggestions etc via email to the developer mailing list mailto gnuplot beta lists sourceforge net Please contribute your suggestions with respect to the file faq tex available from http gnuplot cvs sourceforge net viewvc gnuplot faq 1 General Information 1 1 What is gnuplot gnuplot is a command driven interactive function plotting program It can be used to plot functions and data points in both two and three dimensional plots in many different formats It is designed primarily for the visual display of scientific data gnuplot is copyrighted but freely distributable you don t have to pay for it 1 2 How did it come about and why is it called gnuplot
17. ers is zero your range may be considered empty gnuplot gt plot testl Warning empty y range 4 047e 19 3e 11 adjusting to 1 1 gnuplot gt set yrange 4e 19 3e 11 gnuplot gt plot testl A y range is less than zero The solution is to change gnuplot s idea of zero gnuplot gt set zero le 20 For more information type help set zero 7 4 When I run gnuplot from the shell or a script the resulting plot flashes by on the screen and then disappears 1 Puta pause 1 after the plot command in the file or at the file end 2 Use command gnuplot filename gp yes dash is the last parameter to stay in the interactive regime when the script completes 3 Run gnuplot as gnuplot persist 4 On Windows you can also use either persist or noend 5 Give the persist option as part of the set terminal command 7 5 My formulas like 1 3 are giving me nonsense results What s going on Gnuplot does integer and not floating point arithmetic on integer expressions For example the expression 1 3 evaluates to zero If you want floating point expressions supply trailing dots for your floating point numbers Example gnuplot gt print 1 3 0 gnuplot gt print 1 3 0 333333 This way of evaluating integer expressions is shared by both C and Fortran 7 6 My output files are incomplete You may need to flush the output with a closing set output Some output formats postscript pdf lat
18. ex svg can include several pages of plots in a single output file For these output modes gnuplot leaves the file open after each plot so that you can add additional plots to it The file is not completed and made available to external applications until you explicitly close it set output orunset output or select a different terminal type set term or exit gnuplot Output formats that contain only a single page png emf should not suffer from this problem 7 7 When using the 4TpX terminal there is an error during the 4Tf_X run The IAT amp X2e core no longer includes the commands Diamond and Box they are included in the latexsym package Other symbols are taken from the amssymb package Both of these are part of the base distribution and thus part of any LaTeX implementation Please remember to include these packages in your LaTeX document 17 7 8 Calling gnuplot in a pipe or with a gnuplot script doesn t produce a plot You can call gnuplot by using a short Perl script like the following usr local bin perl w open GP usr local bin gnuplot persist or die no gnuplot force buffer to flush after each write use FileHandle GP gt autoflush 1 print GP set term xll plot tmp data dat with lines n close GP Gnuplot closes its plot window on exit The close GP command is executed and the plot window is closed even before you have a chance to look at it There are three soluti
19. f the top bottom left and right borders in terms of their fractional position within the page set lmargin at screen 0 05 set bmargin at screen 0 05 set rmargin at screen 0 95 set tmargin at screen 0 95 7 Common problems 7 1 Help None of my fonts work Gnuplot does not do font handling by itself it must necessarily leave that to the individual device support libraries Unfortunately this means that different terminal types need different help in finding fonts Here are some quick hints For more detailed information please see the gnuplot documentation for the specific terminal type you are having problems with png jpeg gif These terminal types use the libgd support library which searches for fonts in the directories given in the environmental variable GDFONTPATH Once you get libgd fontpaths sorted out you will probably want to set a default font for gnuplot Forexample setenv GNUPLOT_DEFAULT_GDFONT verdana pdf The libpdf support library should have come with an associated font configuration file usually installed as usr local share pdflib upr The environmental variable PDFLIBRESOURCE should point to this file post PostScript font names are not resolved until the document is printed Gnuplot does not know what fonts are available to your printer so it will accept any font name you give it However it is possible to bundle a font with the gnuplot output please see the instructions given by gnuplot s internal command help
20. gnuplot FAQ This document refers both to gnuplot version 4 and version 5 FAQ version Revision 1 57 dated Date 2015 01 01 01 23 06 Contents 0 Meta Questions 3 01 Wheredol eet this document lt 2 56 46 be wee ebb ap e hese ed eee eae 3 0 2 Where do I send comments about this document 22 004 3 1 General Information 3 Ld Whatis enuplot gt sios s owe a eed be SR ae RM Ae RA AA we Dae 3 1 2 How did it come about and why is it called gnuplot 3 1 3 Whatdoes enuplot offer 2 sco s sa eces 5446 26 24 ee ewe ee we de ee 8 3 1 4 Is gnuplot suitable for scripting 2 ee ee ee ee 4 1 5 Can Irun gnuplot on my computer 0 22 0 020000000004 4 16 Legales oo i 68 5 And a acetate w oe be a eae Ga ee ee i Sa 4 1 7 Does gnuplot have anything to do with the FSF and the GNU project 4 1 8 Where do I get further information 2 0 0 02 0000004 4 2 Setting it up 4 2 1 What is the current version of gnuplot 2 20 20 02 0000 4 4 2 2 Where canI get gnuplot o o ce aoea eccna ee ee 4 2 3 Where can I get current development version of gnuplot oaaae aaa 5 2 4 How do I get gnuplot to compile on my system aoaaa 5 2 5 What documentation is there and how do I get it oaoa aaa 5 20 Worked examples s sos siros aa Oe Sead es ds A aT Be E E a ee eo A ema ee 5 2 7 How do I modify gnuplot and apply patches 2 2 2 ee
21. ile by command awk f addblanks awk lt a dat or plot the datafile under a unixish platform by gnuplot gt splot lt awk f addblanks awk a dat 3 10 Drawing 2D projection of 3D data Use set view map There are also plotting styles with image and with rgbimage for plotting 2D color images 3 11 How to overlay dots points scatter plot onto a pm3d map surface Use the explicit see also implicit switch of the pm3d style gnuplot gt set pm3d explicit gnuplot gt splot x with pm3d xx y with points 3 12 How to produce labeled contours Labeling individual contours in a contour plot required special tricks and extra processing steps in gnuplot version 4 See http gnuplot sourceforge net scripts index html tricks here In version 5 the procedure is much simpler Plot the contours twice once with lines and once with labels To make the labels stand out it may help to use set style textbox opaque noborder set contours splot DATA with line DATA with labels boxed 3 13 How to overlay contour plot over pm3d map surface Not needed any more This requires you to write contours into a temporary file using the table terminal and then use this file in the final drawing without set contours The following example demonstrates this for a map for surface remove set pm3d map and put set ticslevel 0 Write contours of function xx x y y to a temporary file set contour base set cntrparam level 20 unset surface set
22. n curves can be easily obtained using the pseudo file with filled curves closed The example below demonstrates this for two curves f x and g x f x cos x g x sin x xmax pi 4 set xrange 0 xmax plot using 1 f 1 g 1 with filledcurves closed Note that the above code fills area between the two curves not area satisfying inequality g x lt f x If you want the latter you should use the ternary operator in using statement to return an undefined value 0 0 if the inequality is not satisfied See the documentation for help filledcurves help special filenames and help ternary and see fillbetween dem in the demos directory 3 9 Pm3d splot from a datafile does not draw anything You do set pm3d splot a dat and no plot but colorbox appears Perhaps there is no blank line in between two subsequent scans isolines in the data file Add blank lines If you are curious what this means then don t hesitate to look to files like demo glass dat or demo triangle dat in the gnuplot demo directory You can find useful the following awk script call it e g addblanks awk which adds blank lines to a data file whenever number in the first column changes blank next ignore comments lines starting with NF lt 3 next ignore lines which don t have at least 3 columns 1 prev printf n prev S1 print blank line print print the line Then either preprocess your data f
23. n the docs and tutorial subdirectories where you ll find files to produce PDF or HTML versions of the User Manual Online copies are available at http gnuplot sourceforge net documentation html 2 6 Worked examples There is a directory of worked examples in the the source distribution These examples and the resulting plots may also be found at http gnuplot sourceforge net demo 2 7 How doI modify gnuplot and apply patches For this you will need to recompile gnuplot Modifications people make are either done by replacing files such as terminal drivers or by patching If a file is a replacement it will probably tell you in its README or in the lines at the beginning To patch a file you need the patch utility and possibly also the automake and autoconf tools A typical command for applying a patch is patch p0 lt newfunctionality diff There is repository of contributed patches in the Patches section on gnuplot s sourceforge site http sourceforge net p gnuplot patches 2 8 How do I determine which options are compiled into gnuplot Given that you have a compiled version of gnuplot you can use the show command to display the list of compile options a k a compilation options or build options that were used to build your copy gnuplot gt show version long 3 Working with it 3 1 How do I get help Read this document Give the help command at the initial prompt After that keep looking through th
24. nts lines error bars Plotting three dimensional data points and surfaces in many different styles contour plot mesh Algebraic computation in integer float and complex arithmetic Data driven model fitting using Marquardt Levenberg minimization Support for a large number of operating systems graphics file formats and output devices Extensive on line help TEX like text formatting for labels titles axes data points Interactive command line editing and history most platforms 1 4 Is gnuplot suitable for scripting Yes Gnuplot can read in files containing additional commands during an interactive session or it can be run in batch mode by piping a pre existing file or a stream of commands to stdin Gnuplot is used as a back end graphics driver by such higher level mathematical packages as Octave and can easily be wrapped in a cgi script for use as a web driven plot generator 1 5 Can I run gnuplot on my computer Gnuplot is in widespread use on many platforms including MS Windows linux unix and OSX The current source code retains supports for older systems as well including VMS Ultrix OS 2 and MS DOS 16 bit platforms are no longer supported You should be able to compile the gnuplot source more or less out of the box in any reasonably standard ANSI ISO C POSIX environment 1 6 Legalities Gnuplot is authored by a collection of volunteers who cannot make any legal statement about the compliance or non compliance of g
25. nuplot or its uses There is no warranty whatsoever Use at your own risk Citing from the README of a mathematical subroutine package by R Freund For all intent and purpose any description of what the codes are doing should be construed as being a note of what we thought the codes did on our machine on a particular Tuesday of last year If you re really lucky they might do the same for you someday Then again do you really feel that lucky 1 7 Does gnuplot have anything to do with the FSF and the GNU project Gnuplot is neither written nor maintained by the FSF At one time it was distributed by the FSF but this is no longer true Gnuplot as a whole is not covered by the GNU General Public License GPL Gnuplot is freeware in the sense that you don t have to pay for it However it is not freeware in the sense that you would be allowed to distribute a modified version of your gnuplot freely Please read and accept the modification and redistribution terms in the Copyright file 1 8 Where do I get further information See the main gnuplot web page http www gnuplot info Some documentation and tutorials are available in other languages than English See http gnuplot sourceforge netv help html section Localized learning pages about gnuplot for the most up to date list 2 Setting it up 2 1 What is the current version of gnuplot The current released version of gnuplot is 5 0 released in January 2015 Incremental versions p
26. ons to this first use the pause 1 command in gnuplot before closing the pipe Second close the pipe only if you are sure that you don t need gnuplot and its plot window anymore Last you can use the command line option persist this option leaves the X Window System plot window open 8 Credits Gnuplot 3 7 s main contributors are in alphabetical order Hans Bernhard Broeker John Campbell Robert Cunningham David Denholm Gershon Elber Roger Fearick Carsten Grammes Lucas Hart Lars Hecking Thomas Koenig David Kotz Ed Kubaitis Russell Lang Alexander Lehmann Alexander Mai Carsten Steger Tom Tkacik Jos Van der Woude James R Van Zandt and Alex Woo Additional substantial contributors to version 4 0 include Ethan Merritt Petr Mikul k and Johannes Zellner Version 4 2 4 4 4 6 and 5 0 releases were coordinated by Ethan Merritt This list was initially compiled by John Fletcher with contributions from Russell Lang John Campbell David Kotz Rob Cunningham Daniel Lewart and Alex Woo Reworked by Thomas Koenig from a draft by Alex Woo with corrections and additions from Alex Woo John Campbell Russell Lang David Kotz and many corrections from Daniel Lewart Again reworked for gnuplot 3 7 by Alexander Mai and Juergen v Hagen with corrections by Lars Hecking Hans Bernhard Broecker and others Revised for gnuplot version 4 by Petr Mikul k and Ethan Merritt Revised for gnuplot version 5 by Ethan Merritt 18
27. pdf TEX BTEX etc should be preferred as you can scale your graph later to the right size Details depend on which word processor you use use set term to get a list of available file formats Many word processors can use Encapsulated PostScript eps for graphs You can select eps output in gnuplot using the set terminal postscript eps command Note that it is a good idea to check and correct the bounding box of the graphs in the eps files manually or by the fixbb script from gnuplot webpage as you have to correct this box for any eps figure produced by whichever program Some most word processors do not preview the actual image in the eps file and you have to add the preview image yourself You can use the GSView viewer for this available for OS 2 Windows and X11 or some Unix ps tool Some Windows office applications including OpenOffice org can handle vector images in EMF format These can be either produced by the emf terminal or by selecting Save as EMF from the toolbar of the graph window of the windows terminal OpenOffice org can also read SVG as well as AutoCAD s dxf format There are many ways to use gnuplot to produce graphs for inclusion in a T X or BIEX document Some terminals produce tex fragments for direct inclusion others produce eps pdf png output to be included using the includegraphics command The epslatex and cairolatex terminals produce both a graphics file eps or pdf and a tex doc
28. rnal shared object i e a plugin So if you want to code up some complicated function in C or another language with compatible calling conventions you can compile it into a plugin for gnuplot to import 5 5 Can I do heavy duty data processing with gnuplot or What is beyond gnuplot gnuplot by itself is not suited very well for heavy numerical computation On the other hand it can handle very large data sets One thing you might try is fudgit an interactive multi purpose fitting program written by Martin D Lacasse It can use gnuplot as its graphics back end You might also want to look at the applications developed by the Software Tools Group STG at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications http ncsa uiuc edu You can also try pgperl an integration of the PGPLOT plotting package with Perl 5 Information can be found at http Awww ast cam ac uk AAO local www kgb pgperl the source is available from ftp ast cam ac uk in pub kgb pgperl or linux nrao edu in pub packages pgperl Another possibility is Octave To quote from its README Octave is a high level language primarily intended for numerical computations Octave is licensed under GPL and in principle it is a free Matlab clone It provides a convenient command line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically The latest released version of Octave is always available from http Awww octave org By the way octave uses gnuplot as its plotting engine so yo
29. set term post fontfile svg Font handling is viewer dependent x11 The x11 terminal uses the normal x11 font server mechanism The only tricky bit is that in order to use multi byte fonts you must explicitly say so set term x11 font mbfont sazanami mincho vera 20 win Select Choose font from the Options pull down menu in the toolbar wxt qt On linux systems these terminals rely on fonts provided by the system s fontconfig utility 7 2 Gnuplot does not open a plot window on VMS Why On VMS you need to make several symbols gnuplot_x11 Sdisk directory gnuplot_x11 gnuplot Sdisk directory gnuplot exe def job GNUPLOTSHELP disk directory gnuplot hlb Then run gnuplot from your command line and use set term x11 On Unix systems the x11 and qt terminals require installation of separate helper programs gnuplot_xI1 and gnuplot_qt These are usually installed in a directory usr libexec gnuplot 5 0 and gnuplot knows to look for them there If they are installed somewhere else or gnuplot is having trouble finding them try setting the environmental variable GNUPLOT_DRIVER_DIR 16 7 3 Why does gnuplot ignore my very small numbers For some purposes Gnuplot treats numbers less than le 08 as being zero Thus if you are trying to plot a collection of very small numbers they may be plotted as zero Worse if you re plotting on a log scale they will be off scale Or if the whole set of numb
30. solution to your problem almost impossible Also any context diffs should be referenced against the latest official version of gnuplot if at all possible 5 2 Can I use gnuplot routines for my own programs On systems supporting pipes you can pipe commands to gnuplot from other programs Many applications with gnuplot as the graphics engine like Octave http www octave org uses this method This also works from a cgi script to drive gnuplot from a forms based web page John Campbell mailto j dc nauvax ucc nau edu modified a much earlier version of gnuplot 3 5 to be a library of C subroutines callable from a C program Gnuplot itself has changed radically since then and we are not aware of any plans to create a similar library based on the current version 5 3 What extensions have people made to gnuplot Where can I get them Extensions or patches are available on the Patches page of the gnuplot development site http sourceforge net p gnuplot patches The current development version will generally include features that are not yet part of the most recent official release of gnuplot 5 4 I need an integration fft iir filter Gnuplot has been and is a plotting program not a data processing or mathematical program suite Therefore gnuplot can t do that Look into the demo file bivariat dem for a basic implementation of an integration However gnuplot version 5 does support calling functions from a dynamically loaded exte
31. talic styles within a plot 4 13 How do I skip data points By specifying as a data value as in BwWN EF Orn W DN See also set missing See also set datafile commentschars for specifying comment characters in data files 4 14 How do I plot every nth point This can be specified with various options for the command plot for example plot a dat every 2 If you want to draw a line through every point but only draw a point symbol at every nth point then try plot a dat with linespoints pointinterval n 4 15 How do I plot a vertical line Depending on context the main methods are e set arrow nohead where you have to compute explicitly the start and the end of the arrow e generate inlined datapoints and plot them 4 16 How do I plot data files Easily by a command plot a dat In 3D use splot a dat but don t forget to put a blank line in between two subsequent scans isolines otherwise you will get an error that the data is not gridded see also question 3 9 If your data are not gridded then use set dgrid3d many options 4 17 How do I replot multiplot drawing You cannot directly gnuplot supports replot command not remultiplot You have to write the complete sequence of commands since set multiplot till unset multiplot into a script file Then you can load the script into gnuplot as many times as you need for replotting the drawing to different terminals or output files 5 Mis
32. to the extent that these are supported by the fonts installed on your system The simplest way to enter special characters of any sort if your system supports it is to select UTF 8 encoding This obviates the need to change fonts The various IAT X terminal types latex epslatex tikz context cairolatex hand off text generation to BIEX In this case you can use normal JATRX markup like alpha_ 3 or alpha_ 3 4 10 How do I include accented characters To obtain accented characters like or fi in your labels you should use 8bit character codes together with the appropriate encoding option See the following example gnuplot gt set encoding iso_8859_1 gnuplot gt set title M 374nchner Bierverbrauch 374ber die Jahre gnuplot gt plot bier dat u 1 2 Consequently you can type labels in Czech French Hungarian Russian by means of an appropriate set encoding However you cannot mix two encodings in one file e g accents for west and east latin encodings A more general solution is to use UTF 8 encoded fonts and type the UTF 8 characters directly into gnuplot This works for many terminal types but is very cumbersome for PostScript 11 4 11 Can Ido 1 1 scaling of axes Try set size squareorset view equal xy 4 12 Can I put different text sizes into my plots Most terminal types allow you to specify a starting font face and size The enhanced text mode allows you to change fonts text sizes bold and i
33. u get a data processing program on top of gnuplot Finally there is scilab http Awww scilab org an open source alternative to matlab 13 5 6 How to use hotkeys in my interactive terminals Most of the interactive terminals support both pre defined and user defined hotkeys to replot toggle plot ele ments change axis scaling and so on Hit A in an active gnuplot plot window to get list of hotkeys Read help mouse and help bind for more information 5 7 I have ported gnuplot to another system or patched it What do I do The preferred way of submitting commenting and upgrading patches is via Patches section on http sourceforge net p gnuplot patches You may want to send a note to mailto gnuplot beta lists sourceforge net for more lively discussion 5 8 I want to help in developing the next version of gnuplot What can I do Join the gnuplot beta test mailing list by sending a mail containing the line subscribe gnuplot beta in the body not the subject of the mail to mailto Majordomo lists sourceforge net 5 9 Open questions for inclusion into the FAQ Please submit your questions along with the answer to mailto gnuplot beta lists sourceforge net 6 Making life easier 6 1 How do I plot two functions in non overlapping regions This used to be complicated In version 5 it is easy place the desired range immediately before each function being plotted For example to plot experimental data and two different fun
34. ument file that refers to it The tikz terminal produces full text and graphics to a pdf file when the output is processed with pdflatex Most word processors can import bitmap images png pbm etc The disadvantage of this approach is that the resolution of your plot is limited by the size of the plot at the time it is generated by gnuplot which is generally a much lower resolution than the document will eventually be printed in The mif terminal type produces output for FrameMaker 3 4 How do I edit or post process a gnuplot graph This depends on the terminal type you use e svg terminal scalable vector graphics output can be further edited by a svg editor e g Inkscape http www inkscape org Skencil http Avww skencil org or Dia http projects gnome org dia or loaded into OpenOffice org with an on fly conversion into OO o Draw primitives e PostScript or PDF output can be edited directly by tools such as Adobe Illustrator or Acrobat or can be converted to a variety of other editable vector formats by the pstoedit package Pstoedit is available at http www pstoedit net e The mif terminal type produces an editable FrameMaker document e The DXF format is the AutoCAD s format editable by several other applications e Bitmapped graphics e g png jpeg pbm can be edited using tools such as ImageMagick or Gimp In general you should use a vector graphics program to post process vector graphic formats and a pixel base
35. val 2 2 2 ee ee ee 4 4 Does gnuplot support bar charts histograms boxes 2 0 000000045 4 5 Does gnuplot support pie charts quarterly time charts 2 04 4 6 Can I put multiple pages on one page 2 a 4 7 Does gnuplot support multiple y axes ona single plot 0 4 8 Can I put both commands and data into a single file 2 004 4 9 Can I put Greek letters and super subscripts into my labels 2 0 4 10 How do I include accented characters coet o s acs a t oan ee a a i E a a a Ali CanT doti lecaling of axes a dea Eo ee AS we al a hie ee BAA ee eee 4 12 Can I put different text sizes into my plots 2 2 20 2 0 2 0 000 000048 4 13 Howdo lskipdata permits s s s sa eem be a ea a ee ee 4 14 How do I plot every nth point 2 0 0 0 000 000 0002 0 2 eee ee 4 15 How do l plot a vertical line occa s cae pe ed ba ew bone SE eee ee a 4 16 How do Iplot data files aos asics 544 He BARA ER ER OOH He eS A Rea 4 17 How do I replot multiplot drawing 2 2 2 2 ee ee ee Miscellaneous 51 DPvetound a bug whatdo ldo s s e ese seaca ees ee ee oe 5 2 Can I use gnuplot routines for my own programs 2 2 ee ee 5 3 What extensions have people made to gnuplot Where can I getthem 5 4 Ineed an integration fft iir filter 2 ee ee ee 5 5 Can Ido heavy duty data processing with gnuplot or What is beyond gnuplot
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