Gnuplot - an interactive plotting program
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University of Hawaii at Manoa College of Engineering |
These pages are still under construction.
Gnuplot is an interactive graphing program, which is available for many
different environments including Unix and DOS/Windows.
It is a powerful tool used to create plots of data and functions. Gnuplot has
many settings which can be modified to fine-tune your plots. This tutorial
will not to go into too much detail about every possible setting, but will go
over the procedures to create some simple plots, with additional information
about settings available separately.
Getting Started
Commands for Gnuplot can be typed in at its prompt, or specified within a command file which you can specify as gnuplot's argument(s). Before plotting your data files or functions, you must pick the output format. Gnuplot has a wide variety of terminal and output file types. Of these, four are applicable for use in Holmes 244:
- To the screen (Workstation or X Terminal)
- To the HP 7550A plotter (you must bring your o wn paper)
- To the Postscript printer (also requires you to bring your paper)
- To a graphics file.
Defining Functions and Data Files
Gnuplot allows both data and function plots, and also allows many plots to be overlaid. In addition, you can define your own functions and use data files.
Plot types available
Certain "cosmetic" options for Gnuplot are universally used for the different plots. Gnuplot can create the following kinds of plots:
- Two-dimensional plots
- Three-dimensional plots
Additional Information
For more information, the Gnuplot manual (PostScript, 342k bytes) and a reference card (PostScript, 113k bytes) are also available. The information from the manuals has been extracted in this page.