Gnuplot FAQ This document deals with gnuplot version 4.2 which is the latest official release as of March 2007. Its version is $Revision: 1.32 $, dated $Date: 2007/03/12 17:43:14 $. Contents * 0 Meta - Questions * 0.1 Where do I get this document? * 0.2 Where do I send comments about this document? * 1 General Information * 1.1 What is gnuplot? * 1.2 How did it come about and why is it called gnuplot? * 1.3 What does gnuplot offer? * 1.4 Is gnuplot suitable for scripting? * 1.5 Can I run gnuplot on my computer? * 1.6 Legalities * 1.7 Does gnuplot have anything to do with the FSF and the GNU project? * 1.8 Where do I get further information? * 2 Setting it up * 2.1 What is the current version of gnuplot? * 2.2 Where can I get gnuplot? * 2.3 Where can I get current development version of gnuplot? * 2.4 How do I get gnuplot to compile on my system? * 2.5 What documentation is there, and how do I get it? * 2.6 Worked examples * 2.7 How do I modify gnuplot, and apply 'patches'? * 3 Working with it. * 3.1 How do I get help? * 3.2 How do I print out my graphs? * 3.3 How do I include my graphs in <word processor>? * 3.4 How do I edit or post-process a gnuplot graph? * 3.5 How do I change symbol size, line thickness and the like? * 3.6 How do I generate plots in GIF format? * 3.7 Can I animate my graphs? * 3.8 How do I plot implicit defined graphs? * 3.9 How to fill an area between two curves * 3.10 Pm3d splot from a datafile does not draw anything * 3.11 Drawing a (color) map, i.e. 2D projection of 3D data * 3.12 How to overlay dots/points scatter plot onto a pm3d map/surface * 3.13 How to draw black contour plot, and contours with labels * 3.14 How to overlay contour plot over pm3d map/surface * 3.15 Color facets with pm3d * 3.16 Palette for printing my color map on color as well as black&white printer? * 4 Wanted features * 4.1 What's new in gnuplot 3.7, 4.0, 4.2 etc? * 4.2 Does gnuplot support a driver for <graphics format>? * 4.3 Does gnuplot have hidden line removal? * 4.4 Does gnuplot support bar-charts/histograms/boxes? * 4.5 Does gnuplot support pie charts? * 4.6 Does gnuplot quarterly time charts? * 4.7 Can I put multiple pages on one page? * 4.8 Does gnuplot support multiple y-axes on a single plot? * 4.9 Can I put both commands and data into a single file? * 4.10 Can I put Greek letters and super/subscripts into my labels? * 4.11 How do I include accented characters * 4.12 Can I do 1:1 scaling of axes? * 4.13 Can I put different text sizes into my plots? * 4.14 How do I skip data points? * 4.15 How do I plot every nth point? * 4.16 How do I plot a vertical line? * 4.17 How do I plot data files * 4.18 How do I replot multiplot drawing * 5 Miscellaneous * 5.1 I've found a bug, what do I do? * 5.2 Can I use gnuplot routines for my own programs? * 5.3 What extensions have people made to gnuplot? Where can I get them? * 5.4 I need an integration, fft, iir-filter,...! * 5.5 Can I do heavy-duty data processing with gnuplot? or What is beyond gnuplot? * 5.6 Mouse in my interactive terminal does not work * 5.7 How to use hotkeys in my interactive terminals * 5.8 I have ported gnuplot to another system, or patched it. What do I do? * 5.9 I want to help in developing the next version of gnuplot. What can I do? * 5.10 Open questions for inclusion into the FAQ? * 6 Making life easier * 6.1 How do I plot two functions in non-overlapping regions? * 6.2 How do I run my data through a filter before plotting? * 6.3 How do I make it easier to use gnuplot with LATEX? * 6.4 How do I save and restore my settings? * 6.5 How do I plot lines (not grids) using splot? * 6.6 How do I plot a function f(x,y) that is bounded by other functions in the x-y plane? * 6.7 How do I turn off <feature> in a plot? * 6.8 How do I call gnuplot from my own programs? * 6.9 What if I need h-bar (Planck's constant)? * 6.10 What if I need the Solar mass symbol? * 6.11 How do I produce blank output page? * 7 Common problems * 7.1 Help! None of my fonts work. * 7.2 Gnuplot is not plotting any points under X11! How come? * 7.3 Why does gnuplot ignore my very small numbers? * 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? * 7.6 Set output 'filename' isn't outputting everything it should! * 7.7 When using the LATEX-terminal, there is an error during the LATEX-run! * 7.8 I can't find the demos and example files at the URLs in the documentation! * 7.9 Calling gnuplot in a pipe or with a gnuplot-script doesn't produce a plot! * 8 Credits 0 Meta - Questions 0.1 Where do I get this document? The newest version of this document is on the web at http://www.gnuplot.info/faq/. This document was/is posted sometimes to the newsgroups ~comp.graphics.apps.gnuplot. 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.net. Please contribute your suggestions with respect to the file faq.tex available from http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/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? 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". 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 "llamaplot" 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) * Plotting three-dimensional data points and surfaces in many different styles (contour plot, mesh) * Algebraic computation in integer, float and complex arithmetic * User-defined functions and hot-keys * 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 available for a number of platforms. These are: Unix (X11 and NeXTSTEP), Linux, VMS, OS/2, MS-DOS, Amiga, MS-Windows, OS-9/68k, Atari ST, BeOS, and Macintosh. 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) env...
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