Gnuplot

Gnuplot (proper spelling: gnuplot ) is a script or command-line driven computer program for the graphical display of measurement data and mathematical functions ( function plotter ). The Gnuplot project is driven continuously by an international team of volunteer developers since 1986. The source code is managed since 2000 on Sourceforge.

Functions

Gnuplot generates various two - and three-dimensional plots that can be interactively manipulated (especially zoom and rotate). The plots can be displayed on the screen and are saved in different graphic formats (eg EPS, PNG, SVG and others).

Gnuplot allows one hand to define their own functions that can be plotted. On the other hand also reads Gnuplot (measuring) data from files and provides them graphically represents the data can be post-processed by using functions. Furthermore Gnuplot functional relationships can adapt to the data ( Fitten, compensation calculation ).

Area of ​​application

Gnuplot comes from the Unix world, but runs on all major operating systems. It does not have a graphical user interface, but is controlled by the command line operated or via scripts. In addition, there is a variety of graphical user interfaces for the program, about Xgfe, PlotDrop or qgfe on Unix and Windows wgnuplot.

In the scientific field Gnuplot is automatically scripted plots from data or measured values ​​to produce because of its small plots and the possibility of very popular. The program handles large amounts of data efficiently and is compared to commercial alternatives space saving and fast. The original data remain intact and must not be kept in a " Worksheet ".

Embedding

Gnuplot is designed as a standalone application, not as a graphic library. To include Gnuplot as a subroutine in other applications, so a Gnuplot process is started and controlled via a pipe. Graphics commands and data can be transmitted and processed through the pipe to gnuplot.

Among the users of this mode of operation include, for example, the numerical software GNU Octave and the computer algebra system Maxima.

Name and License

Gnuplot is distributed under a free license, which allows copies and modifications of the source code. Modified versions may, however, only be distributed as patches.

Despite its name, gnuplot is not related to the GNU project, and also does not use the GNU General Public License: Originally, the program should Newplot hot. Since under that name already existed software, the authors named their project unceremoniously into Gnuplot what in American English homophonic to the original name ( = phonetically equal to).

Revision history

Examples

Mathematical Functions

The function is issued, for example, with the following commands:

F ( x ) = x ** 2 Plot f (x) or simply

Plot x ** 2 The graph generated by gnuplot sees when selecting SVG as an output format as follows:

Diagram with external data

With Gnuplot can also diagrams to any data compilations, create: The curve of the underlying data were in the preparation in a separate file (in this case mitglieder.dat ) and are available on the description page.

# Output file and format set output ' Pirate Party Germany - Mitglieder.svg ' set terminal svg   # Date format set locale ' en_US.UTF - 8' set xdata time set timefmt "% Y- % m -% d " set format x "% b. % Y "   # Title set title ' Membership Development of the Pirate Party Germany '   # Axes and grid unset xlabel xtics set out nomirror rotate 1 autofreq scale 1,0.5 set ylabel ' members ' ytics set out nomirror scale 0.5 set grid ytics set border 3 set yrange [ 0:14000 ]   # Legend set key outside bottom center box title ' elections '   # plotting plot ' mitglieder.dat ' using 2:1 with line lt 7 lw 3 title '', \          ' - ' Using 1: ( 12e6 ) with pulse lt 1 lw 1 title ' Election to the 7 th European Parliament in 2009 ', \          ' - ' Using 1: ( 12e6 ) with pulse lt 3 lw 1 title ' election to the 17th German Bundestag in 2009 ' # Election dates 2009-06-07 e 2009-09-27 e The code produces the following graph:

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