gnuplot faq
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1. Gnuplot is neither written nor maintained by the FSF It is not covered by the General Public License either It used to be distributed by the FSF however due to licensing issues it is no longer 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 Copyright file in your distribution 1 8 Where do I get further information See the main gnuplot web page www gnuplot inf land references therein mainly gnuplot links gnuplot Some documentation and tutorials are available in other languages than English See gnuplot sourceforge 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 4 4 March 2010 The current patchlevel is 4 4 0 March 2010 2 2 Where can I get gnuplot The best place to start is www gnuplot infc From there you find various pointers to other sites including the project development site on SourceForge sourceforge net projects gnuplot The source distribution gnuplot 4 4 0 tar gz or a similar name is available from the official distribution site sourceforge net projects gnuploty gt O O Older versions of the gnuplot distribution are mirrored at the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network CTAN in the graphics g2. able There is an interface to the OS 2 presentation manager You might also want to look at the applications developed by the Software Tools Group STG at the Na tional Center for Supercomputing Applications Ftp to ftp ncsa uiuc edu and get the file README BROCHURE for more information You can also try pgperl an integration of the PGPLOT plotting package with Perl 5 Information can be found at www ast cam ac uk AAO 1ocal www kgb pgper the source is available from ftp ast cam ac uk in pub kgb pgper1 or linux nrao eduin 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 www octave org By the way octave uses gnuplot as its plotting engine so you get a data processing program on top of gnuplot Finally there is scilab atwww rocq inria fr scilab doing about the same as matlab It is free but copyrighted software 5 6 Mouse in my interactive terminal does not work If your mouse is not working try to hit m in the interactive terminal to switch mousing on off See below for the list of supported interactive terminals If it still does not run then either gnuplot h
3. 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 1 3 What does gnuplot offer Plotting two dimensional functions and data points in many different styles points lines error bars e Plotting three dimensional data points and surfaces in many different styles contour plot mesh Algebraic computation in integer float and complex arithmetic e User defined functions and hot keys Support for a large number of operating systems graphics file formats and output devices e Extensive on line help TEX like text formatting for labels titles axes data points e 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
4. set contour base set cntrparam level 20 unset surface set 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 10 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 x1 yl zl lt cl gt x2 y2 zZ2 lt c2 gt x2 y2 zZ2 lt c2 gt triangle 2 xyz 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 pm3dorsplot 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 anythi
5. 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 MS DOS Amiga OS 9 68k BeOS and Macintosh Versions since 4 0 have not been extensively tested on legacy platforms Please notify the FAQ maintainer of any further ports you might be aware of You should be able to compile the gnuplot source more or less out of the box on any reasonable standard ANSI ISO C POSIX environment 1 6 Legalities Gnuplot is freeware authored by a collection of volunteers who cannot make any legal statement about the compliance or non compliance of gnuplot or its uses There is also 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
6. 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 The set style command can be used to define additional combinations 3 6 Can I animate my graphs First have a look at animate dem in the demo directory of gnuplot Basically animated graphs are a sequence of plots in a suitable format If your installation of gnuplot is linked with gd 2 0 29 or newer see previous entry the gif terminal can generate directly an animated GIF Otherwise have a look at the tool whirlgif 3 04 available at www danbbs dk dino whirlgifj Tt reads run length encoded GIF files and packs them into a minimal animation On the web pages you will find a manual and an example You can also write a small script to get gnuplot to output a family of GIF files then have it execute some animator such as gifsicle www Ledf org eddietwo gifsicl jor gifmerge the labs com mpeg_encode will encode a sequence of images into an mpeg format movie 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 g
7. piped via stdin Output from gnuplot s print command can be read via a named pipe On M Windows platforms due to the lacking standard input stdin in GUI programs you need to use the helper program pgnuplot which should be included in your gnuplot for M W distribution package Reading gnuplot output may be impossible 6 9 What if I need h bar Planck s constant The most straightforward way is to use a UTF 8 font and type in the fi 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 way to get that I tried using an accent character 264 in iso latin 1 17 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 Gnuplot confer the help about fontpath and the PostScript interpreter usually Ghostscript have to know where the file msbm10 pfb or msbm10 pfa resides Use MSBM10 1
8. py A python package to create graphs from within python More information at 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 For more sophisticated data processing read the next section 5 5 Can I do heavy duty data processing with gnuplot or What is beyond gnuplot gnuplot alone is not suited very well for this One thing you might try is fudgit an interactive multi purpose fitting program written by Martin D Lacasse isaac frodo physics mcgill ca It can use gnuplot as its graphics back end and is available from ftp physics mcgill cajin pub Fudgit fudgit_2 33 tar Z and from the main Linux server tsx 11 mit edu and its numerous mirrors around the world as pub linux sources usr bin fudgit 2 33 tar z Versions are available for AIX Data General HP UX IRIX 4 Linux NeXT Sun3 Sun4 Ultrix OS 2 and MS DOS The MS DOS version is available on simtel20 mirrors simtel20 itself has closed down in the math subdirectory as fudg_231 zip Michael Courtney has written a program called Isqrft which uses the Levenberg Marquardt algorithm for fitting data to a function It is available from hobbes nmsu edu in pub os2 apps analysis sources which should compile on Unix and executables for MS DOS and OS 2 are avail
9. 75 to produce hslash which is a 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 10 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 11 How do I 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 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 fo
10. Gnuplot FAQ This document deals with gnuplot version 4 4 which is the latest official release as of March 2010 Its versionis Revision 1 40 dated Date 2010 03 14 06 59 57 S Contents 0 Meta Questions 3 0 1 Where do I get thisdocument 0 0 0 00 00 0020000 2 ee ee 3 0 2 Where do I send comments about this document o o aa 3 1 General Information 3 1 1 Whatis gnuplot o o ses ea eaae a a ee 3 1 2 How did it come about and why is it called gnuplot aoaaa 3 1 3 What does gnuplot offer 2 aaa 3 1 4 Is gnuplot suitable for scripting 2 2 ee ee ee 4 1 5 Can Irun gnuplot on my computer a 4 LO Woh 43 s bs Bb wee He ehh 4 ed Ha eee ee bg wah aes 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 0 0 0 000000 000004 4 2 Setting it up 4 2 1 What is the current version of gnuplot 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 e 4 2 2 Where can I get gnuplot 2 2 ee 5 2 3 Where can I get current development version of gnuplot 5 2 4 How do I get gnuplot to compile on my system 2 2 2 2 2 020 000000 5 2 What documentation is there and how dol getit 2 0 2000 5 SE Sees po ae ar cep errs Re a soe ein they ge 6 2 7 How do I modify gnuplot and apply patches 2 0 0 00000 6 3 Working with it 6 3 1 Howdolgethelp 2 26 sca ea eek e
11. 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 Mikulik and Johannes Zellner Version 4 2 and 4 4 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 other people Revised for gnuplot 4 0 release by Petr Mikul k and Ethan Merritt Revised for gnuplot 4 2 release by Petr Mikul k and Ethan Merritt Revised for gnuplot 4 4 release by Ethan Merritt 20
12. al a org can also read AutoCAD s dxi format as well as SVG thanks to SVG Import Filter With TEX it depends on what you use to print your dvi files If you use dvips or dvi2ps you can use Encapsulated PostScript For emTeX popular for OS 2 and MS DOS you can use emTeX otherwise use the BIEX terminal type which generates a picture environment You can also use epslatex to separate the graphics and text parts Other possibilities include pslatex or pstex terminals and metafont or metapost terminals With TEX processed by pdftex or pdflatex you can use png jpeg and pdf terminal types You can also use the postscript eps terminal and convert the eps file externally to pdf by epstopdf Another choice is the epslatex terminal after converting the eps part to pdf as above the TEX part can remain unchanged 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 Under IBM OS 2 MacOS and Micro oft Windows you can use the clipboard to copy your graph and paste it into your favourite word processor 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 X11 toolkits You can use the terminal type fig and us
13. as not been configured or compiled with mouse support or you have not properly installed it or running an older version of gnuplot check your PATH If your gnuplot is running as the plotting engine of Octave under X11 then please put set mouse into your SHOME gnuplot preferred than putting gset mouse into SHOME octaverc This is needed only for gnuplot 4 0 according to its help x11_mouse gnuplot 4 0 under x11 running through a pipe needs set mouse to be executed before launching the x11 plot window 5 7 How to use hotkeys in my interactive terminals There are several hotkeys available in interactive terminals Currently the following interactive terminals sup port hotkeys and mousing OS 2 Presentation Manager X11 Windows WX and GGI Hit h in the terminal to get list of hotkeys See help new features or the Features introduced in version 4 0 section in the docs for a brief guide over mousing and hotkeys Further you may read help mouse and help bind for more information 15 5 8 I have ported gnuplot to another system or patched it What do I do If your patch is small mail itto gnuplot beta lists sourceforge net with a thorough description of what the patch is supposed to do which version of gnuplot it is relative to etc Well please do it always with respect to the current development version of gnuplot see cvs above Nowadays the preferred way of submitting commenting and upgrading patches are
14. e 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 5 How do I plot lines not grids using splot If the data in a data file for splot is arranged in such a way that each one has the same number of data points using blank lines as delimiters as usual splot will plot the data with a grid If you want to plot just lines use a different number of data entries you can do this by doubling the last data point for example Don t forget to set parametric mode of course 6 6 How do I plot a function f x y that is bounded by other functions in the x y plane An example gnuplot gt f x y x 2 y x2 gnuplot gt x u 3x u gnuplot gt yu x xx x 2 gnuplot gt yl x x 2 gnuplot gt set parametric gnuplot gt set cont gnuplot gt splot 0 1 0 1 u yl x u yu x u yl x u v gt x u yu x u yl x u v 6 7 How do I turn off lt feature gt in a plot Most gnuplot features are controlled by a corresponding set unset command If a feature is enabled by default or by using set lt feature gt then you should be able to turn it by using set no lt feature gt However the prefered syntax since version 4 0 is unset lt feature gt 6 8 How do I call gnuplot from my own programs On unix like systems commands to gnuplot can be
15. e the xfig drawing program to edit the plot after wards You can obtain the xfig program from its web site www xfig org More information about the text format used for fig can be found in the fig package You may use the tgif terminal which creates output suitable for reading within tgif bourbon cs umd edu 8001 tgif an interactive 2 D drawing tool under X11 e You may use the svg terminal scalable vector graphics which can be further edited by a svg edi tor e g Inkscape www inkscape org Sketch sket ch sourceforge net or Dia www lysator liu se alla dia or loaded into OpenOffice org with an on fly conversion into OO o0 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 www pstoedit neth S OSO 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 based 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
16. ee ea OO ae ee ee ewe 6 3 2 How do I print out my graphs aoaaa ee 6 3 3 How do I include my graphs in lt word processor gt 2 2 a 7 3 4 How do I edit or post process a gnuplot graph 2 2 ee 7 3 5 How do I change symbol size line thickness and the like 2 0 8 3 6 Can I animate my graphs 2 2 ee 8 3 7 How do I plot implicit defined graphs 2 0 ee ee 8 3 8 How to fill an area between two curves oaoa a ee 9 3 9 Pm3d splot from a datafile does not draw anything 200 9 ETTO T 9 DORS NOTEN 9 eSa S A E nt 10 Fe On e ene aks 10 3 14 Color facets withpm3d 0 0 ke ei e eed e aei A e E ee 11 3 15 Palette for printing my color map on color as well as black amp white printer 11 4 Wanted features 11 4 1 What s new in gnuplot 4 2 4 4 etc 2 eee 11 4 2 Does gnuplot support a driver for lt graphics format gt 20004 11 4 3 Does gnuplot have hidden line removal 2 0 2 ee 12 4 4 Does gnuplot support bar charts histograms boxes 000 000045 12 4 5 Does gnuplot support pie charts 2 a 12 4 6 Does gnuplot quarterly time charts 2 2 ee 12 4 7 Can Iput multiple pages on one page 2 a 12 4 8 Does gnuplot support multiple y axes on a single plot o a eaaa a 12 4 9 Can I put both commands and data into a single file oo aaa a 12 4 10 Can I put Greek letters and super subscripts into my
17. end Solution 4 For OS 2 PM terminal use set term pm persist or set term pm server For X11 terminal use set term x11 persist 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 19 7 6 My output files are incomplete You may need to flush the output with a closing set output Some output formats postscript pdf latex 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 or unset 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 BTgX 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
18. files 5 Miscellaneous 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 Fixes for bugs reported since the release of the current version are held inthe pat ches directory at gnuplot distribution sites Before submitting a bug report please check whether the bug in question has already been fixed 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 Comp graphics apps gnup Lotjis probably the way to go If you have investigated a problem in detail especially if you have a context or unified diff that fixes the problem please e email a report tolgnuplot bug lists sourceforge net SSss SSCS The bug gnuplot list is for reporting and collecting bug fixes the 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 solution to your problem almost impossible Also any conte
19. ists sourceforge net lists listinfo gnuplot info But please don t use the mailing list if you can read 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 prints out a graph of sin x on a Unix machine running the X Window System gnuplot gt plot 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 set output set output back to default gnuplot gt set terminal x11 ditto for terminal type gnuplot gt lp ops sin ps print PS File site dependent request id is lprint 3433 standard input lp printed file sin ps on fg20 rz uni karlsruhe de 5068 Byte l 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 ter
20. ith labels Well it is very simple even though it is hard to discover unset clabel set contour both set cntr levels 100 unset clabel unset surface splot x y with line lt 1 pause 1 splot x y with line palette Another solution requires to write contours into a temporary file using the table terminal set contour base set cntrparam levels 15 unset surface set view map splot x xtyxy pause 1 set table contour dat replot unset table Now for drawing it in 2D do reset plot contour dat with line 1 and for contours in 3D do reset Change single blank lines to double blank lines lawk NF lt 2 printf n print lt contour dat gt contourl dat splot contourl dat with line 1 See also the following question How to overlay contour plot over pm3d map surface Labelling contours by their z value can be achieved by a suitable script generating automatically the appro priate set label commands you can find one at gnuplot scripts page gnuplot sourceforge net scripts index html tricks here 3 13 How to overlay contour plot over pm3d map surface 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 mapandput set ticslevel 0 Write contours of function xxx y y to a temporary file
21. labels o oo aaa 12 4 11 How do I include accented characters o oo a 13 4 12 Can Ido 1 1 scaling of axes 2 a 13 4 13 Can I put different text sizes into my plots 2 2 a 13 4 14 How do I skip data points 2 a 13 4 15 How do I plot every nth point 2 2 ee ee 13 4 16 How do I plot a vertical line 2 0 0 00 00002000002 ee ee 13 samai ee Gola A eee tele Be Ge a ee ee Rw 13 4 18 How do I replot multiplot drawing 2 ee 14 5 Miscellaneous 14 5 1 Ive founda bug whatdoIdo 0 2 2 0 2 00002 e 14 5 2 Can I use gnuplot routines for my own programs 20 000 000 14 5 3 What extensions have people made to gnuplot Where can I get them 14 5 4 Ineed an integration fft 11r filter 15 ee 15 5 6 Mouse in my interactive terminal does not work 2 000000 0 15 ntl Sp dh de BOM Real Gala a Oe A ee 15 5 8 have ported gnuplot to another system or patched it WhatdoIdo 16 5 9 I want to help in developing the next version of gnuplot What can I do 16 5 10 Open questions for inclusion into the FAQ 2 ee 16 16 6 1 How do I plot two functions in non overlapping regions 20 16 6 2 How do I run my data through a filter before plotting 0 16 6 3 How do I make it easier to use gnuplot with IATEX 2 ee ee 17 6 4 How do I save and restore my settings 2 ee 17 6 5 How do I plot li
22. m push switches the terminal back to the startup terminal e g x11 pm or win In MS Windows you can click in the upper left corner of the graph window and print directly from there 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 pdf TEX TEX 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 for graphs This can be generated by the set terminal post command Note that it is a good idea to check and correct the bounding box of the graphs in the eps files man ually 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 GS View viewer for this available for OS 2 Windows and X11 or some Unix ps tool Note that the preview image increases size of the eps file the smallest increase you may get by choosing Tiff 6 Packbits Some office Windows applications also OpenOffice org can handle vector images produces by the emf ortiin
23. maller executables without debugging information If you want to make a RPM package then replace the lat est step by checkinstall or checkinstall make install strip supposing the package checkinstall on your machine 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 or makefile mgw or makefile cyg for Windows from config to src optionally 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 The documentation is included in the source distribution Look at the docs subdirectory where you ll find e a PDF version of the user manual e a Unix man page which says how to start gnuplot e ahelp file which also can be printed as a manual e a tutorial on using gnuplot with I4TRxX e a quick reference summary sheet for TEX only The documentation is built during installation if you have I4TRX installed on your system look in the directories docs and tutorial make pdf in the docs subdirectory will make a gnuplot pdf hypertext file ready for browsing or printing Online gnuplot documentation is available at gnuplot sourceforge net documentation htm1 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 gnuplot sourceforge net de
24. mo 00 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 automake and autoconf On many UNIX systems these will already be installed If they aren t you can find them wherever GNU software is archived 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 gnuplot 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 the 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 comp graphics apps gnuplotjor send mail to the gatewayed mailing list j lists sourceforge net Do not forget to cite the version number and the operating system If you want to subscribe to the mailing list visit the URL l
25. n your search path Command which gnuplot_x11 will help you 7 3 Why does gnuplot ignore my very small numbers Gnuplot treats all numbers less than 1e 08 as zero by default 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 numbers 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 N 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 Gnuplot is not plotting on the screen when run from command line via gnuplot filename gp Obviously it draws unless there is an error in the script file but the plot dissappears immediately when the script is completed Solution 1 Put a pause 1 after the plot command in the file or at the file end Solution 2 Use command gnuplot filename gp yes dash is the last parameter to stay in the interactive regime when the script completes Solution 3A On an X Window System system you can also use the persist option the X11 window is then not closed Close the X11 window by typing q when the focus is on it Solution 3B On M Windows you can also use either persist or no
26. nes not grids using splot 2 2 2 0 2 000000000200 17 6 6 How do I plot a function f x y that is bounded by other functions in the x y plane 17 6 7 How do turn off lt feature gt in a plot 2 0 0 0 0 0 2 a 17 6 8 How do I call gnuplot from my own programs 0 00000202 ee 17 6 9 What if I need h bar Planck s constant 0 1 17 6 10 What if I need the Solar mass symbol 2 0 0 0 0 0000000 eee eee eee 18 6 11 How do I produce blank output page 2 ee 18 7 Common problems 18 i dh opie pua E alah E e oe doy he a PoE Se eee 18 7 2 Gnuplot is not plotting any points under X11 How come 2 044 19 17 3 Why does gnuplot ignore my very small numbers 0004 19 7 4 Gnuplot is not plotting on the screen when run from command line via gnuplot filename gp 7 5 My formulas like 1 3 are giving me nonsense results What s going on 2 19 7 6 My output files areincomplete 2 2 0 0 00 0000 0000000000005 20 7 7 When using the IATEX terminal there is an error during the KIEX run 2 2 20 7 8 can t find the demos and example files at the URLs in the documentation 20 7 9 Calling gnuplot in a pipe or with a gnuplot script doesn t produce aplot 20 8 Credits 20 0 Meta Questions 0 1 Where do I get this document The newest version of this document is on the webatwww gnuplot info faq ss This documen
27. ng could be hidden behind The hidden3d algorithm works by using the input data in two ways first to set up a 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 convertor of your facets into a VRML file 3 15 Palette for printing my color map on color as well as black amp white printer I think it is this one for example set palette rgbformulae 25 24 32 Can somebody prove this 4 Wanted features 4 1 What s new in gnuplot 4 2 4 4 etc Too many things to be named 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 11 4 3 Does gnuplot have hidden line removal Yes 4 4 Does gnuplot support bar charts histograms boxes Various clustered and stacked histogram styles are suppor
28. nt size for the entire plot Terminals supporting the enhanced text mode allow you to change fonts and text sizes within a plot Look at the help for these terminals 4 14 How do I skip data points By specifying as a data value as in EWN Ow WN See also set missing See also set datafile commentschars for specifying comment char acters in data files 4 15 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 4 16 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 e switch to parametric mode 4 17 How do I plot data files Easily by a command plot a dat In3D 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 13 4 18 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
29. nuplot directory See e www ctan org O 2 3 Where can I get current development version of gnuplot The development version of gnuplot is availble as a cvs source tree online for direct browsing from sourceforge net projects gnuplot section CVS You can download all current sources according to the docu mentation 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 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 binary releases for some platforms like OS 2 Windows or Macintosh Important note questions related to the development version should go to gnuplot beta lists 2 4 How do I get gnuplot to compile on my system As you would any other installation Read the files README 1ST and README e For Unix use configure or configure prefix HOME usr for an installation for a single user make and finally make install ormake install strip the latter for s
30. nuplot gt set table curve dat gnuplot gt splot f x y gnuplot gt unset table gnuplot gt plot curve dat w 1 0 0 0 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 given curves requires a parametric plot with filledcurves closed The example below demonstrates this for two curves f x and g x with a tricky folded parameter t set parametric x cos x g xX Sin x xmax pi 4 set xrange 0 xmax set trange 0 2 xmax path t t lt xmax f t g 2 xmax t fold t t lt xmax t 2 xmax t plot fold t path t 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 path t to return an undefined value 0 0 if the inequality is not satisfied See the documentation for help parametric help filledcurves and help ternary 3 9 Pm3d splot from a datafile does not draw anything You do set pm3d splot a dat and no plot but colorbox appears Obviously 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
31. 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 7 8 I can t find the demos and example files at the URLs in the documentation The examples have been removed from the NASA site mentioned in older documentation You can find demos from the current version at gnuplot sourceforge net demc Examples from the development version are atignuplot sourceforge net demo_cvs 2 7 9 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 solutions 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
32. r 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 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 Right click in the control window then select Choose font from the pull down menu wxt On linux systems the wxt terminal can find fonts indexed by the fontconfig utility 18 7 2 Gnuplot is not plotting any points under X11 How come On VMS you need to make several symbols gnuplot_x11 S disk 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 If you run gnuplot on Unix systems be sure that the newest gnuplot_x11 is the first i
33. t was is posted sometimes to the newsgroups comp graphics apps gnuplot lt 0 2 Where do I send comments about this document Send comments suggestions etc via email to the developer mailing list gnuplot beta lists sourceforge Please contribute your suggestions with respect to the file faq tex available from gnuplot cvs sourceforge net viewvc gnuplot fag 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 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 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
34. ted in gnuplotversion 4 2 and later as separate style types 4 5 Does gnuplot support pie charts It s not possible in gnuplot but have a look at www usf uni osnabrueck de breiter tools piechart piecharts en html 4 6 Does gnuplot quarterly time charts It s not possible in gnuplot but have a look at ricardo ecn wfu edu cottrell qplot The cor responding file qolot zip can be obtained from the contrib directory on any gnuplot server 4 7 Can I put multiple pages on one page Yes set multiplot If you use the postscript terminal and plot one graph per page you can use the program mpage mesa nl pub mpage to print multiple logical pages per physical page A similar program is the psnup program in the psutils package This package is available at any CTAN mirror 4 8 Does gnuplot support multiple y axes on a single plot Yes You can have 2 x and 2 y axes per plot The additional axes are called x2 and y2 See help plot 4 9 Can I put both commands and data into a single file This is possible by the new plot possibility The plot command allows to read the data to be plot from standard input or the current batch job gnuplot gt plot 1 1 24 o9 e 4 10 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 to the extent
35. that these are supported by the fonts installed on your system You might try using the IATEX terminal type and putting text like alpha_ 3 or alpha_ 3 If you include your gnuplot graphs into a IATRX document you can use the IAIEX package psfrag to typeset any characters into your graphs One more possibility is to use the MetaPost terminal It supports TEX syntax and is converted onto encap sulated PostScript by mpost 12 4 11 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 not unfortunately PostScript Update Version 4 4 contains contains more complete support for UTF 8 including PostScript 4 12 Can Ido 1 1 scaling of axes Use set size square 4 13 Can I put different text sizes into my plots Some terminals can others can t Some allow you to choose a fo
36. 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 1 print blank line print print the line Then either preprocess your data file 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 a color map i e 2D projection of 3D data Use set view map unset surface or set pm3d map rather than set view 180 0 The lat ter facilitates drawing matrices or data files as maps even without the necessity for matrix like data organization gridding It is possible to decrease the output postscript file size by postprocessing it by pn3dCompress awk or pm3dConvertToImage awk Note there is a new plotting style with image for plotting 2D color images with support for almost arbitrary text or binary files in Patches section on gnuplot s sourceforge site 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 draw black contour plot and contours w
37. uld 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 It can work under MS Windows as well but that is for experienced users A When gnuplot has been compiled by cygwin with the unixish way of configure make with X11 terminal instead of the windows terminal You have to run this under an X server This procedure is out of knowledge for usual users but powerful for others B Compile gnuplot yourself by makefile mgw or makefile cyg and set PIPES 1 therein The drawback is that each wgnuplot exe will be accompanied by a boring shell box 16 6 3 How do I make it easier to use gnuplot with ATEX There is a set of IATEX macros and shell scripts that are meant to make your life easier when using gnuplot with ISTEX This package can be found on Ftp dartmouth edujin pub gnuplot latex shar by David Kotz For example the program plotskel can turn a gnuplot output file plot tex into a skeleton file skel tex that has the same size as the original plot but contains no graph With the right macros the skeleton can be used for preliminary I4TRX passes reserving the full graph for later passes saving tremendous amounts of time 6 4 How do I save and restore my settings Use th
38. via Patches section onjsourceforge net tracker group_id 2055 amp atid 302055 You may want to send a note to gnuplot beta lists sourcef for more lively discussion 5 9 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 toMajordomo lists sourceforge net 5 10 Open questions for inclusion into the FAQ Please submit your questions along with the answer to gnuplot beta lists sourceforge net 6 Making life easier 6 1 How do I plot two functions in non overlapping regions Use a parametric plot An example gnuplot gt set parametric gnuplot gt a 1 gnuplot gt b 3 gnuplot gt c 2 gnuplot gt d 4 gnuplot gt x1 t at b a t gnuplot gt x2 t ct d c t gnuplot gt f1 x sin x gnuplot gt 2 x x 2 8 gnuplot gt plot t 0 1 x1l t f1 xl t title fl x2 t f 2 x2 t title f2 You can also use gnuplot s ability to ignore mathematically undefined expressions the expression 1 0 is silently ignored thus a construction like gnuplot gt set xran 10 10 gnuplot gt plot abs x gt 0 5 1 0 xx 2 plots a quadratic function only for x lt 0 5 6 2 How do I run my data through a filter before plotting If your system supports the popen function as Unix does you sho
39. xt 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 from a cgi script to drive gnuplot from a forms based web page John Campbell jdc 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 Many extensions or patches are available on the Patches page of the gnuplot development site sourceforge net tracker group_id 2055 amp atid 302055 The current development version will generally in clude some of these being debugged for inclusion in a later official release of gnuplot Older extensions which may or may not work with the current version are available from ftp ucc i pub gnuplot contrib Some extensions available e date errorbar allows dates in the hi lo fields for errorbars e perltk A perl tk canvas widget e polyg patch Implements a polygon plotting style e xgfe graphical front end using the Qt widgets available atIwww tug org tex archive graphics gnuplot contrib 14 e Gnuplot
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