gnuplot plots 2d and 3d graphs, from a data file or with a formula. It has an interactive mode with online help, or it can be used non-interactively. gnuplot does function fitting to data sets, and it does output to many terminals, among which are PostScript, X11 display, PNG, and GIF (via the old gd library).
| Tags | Scientific/Engineering |
|---|
Recent releases


Changes: Text strings can be read and manipulated as normal data. There is a new interactive terminal based on wxWidgets, pango, and cairo. New 2D plot styles 'histogram', 'labels', 'image', and 'rgbimage'. New 3D plot styles 'labels', 'vectors', 'image', and 'rgbimage'. User control over color definitions and color use in plots. Improved font handling and text formatting. New syntax to handle string variables and string functions. Creation of animated GIF sequences. Support for UTF-8 and other multi-byte font encodings. Japanese language documentation and internal help.


Changes: This release features half a dozen new output drivers, two completely new plotting styles (pm3d, filledcurves), an almost unbelievable number of small and large feature extensions, and some serious changes to the command language. GUI plot windows now interact via mouse and hotkeys, and boxes can be filled. A wholesale reorganization of the code structure was performed and many bugs were fixed.


Changes: Most, if not all, known bugs have been fixed. This will most likely be the final release in the 3.7 series, apart from another one or two possible bugfix releases.


Changes: Bugfixes, support for GNU plotutils, display drivers for BeOS, metapost, and MacOS X Server, and improvements in the documentation and build-process.


Changes: gnuplot now does function fitting, multiple graphs on one output page, and calculations on input columns.
- All comments
Recent commentsRe: very good, mature software
>
> % This is very good, mature software. I
> % recommend it highly. My only
> complaint
> % is that the manual and the built-in
> % documentation are hard to use --
> there
> % aren't enough examples, and the
> % discussion of one topic often assumes
> % knowledge of some other topic, but
> it's
> % hard to find the information on the
> % other topic.
>
>
>
> It does not support incremental
> plotting. Creating a
> 'publication-quality' graph is next to
> impossible. And it
> is omnipresent ... probably due to a
> lack of any advanced
> free graph plotting tool/language (i.e.
> a free equivalent of
> IDL).
Actually, IDL sucks. We could not use it for real-time preparation of pictures for our web site. However, CVS version of gnuplot is good enough and script language is good enough to do this job.
Re: very good, mature software
> This is very good, mature software. I
> recommend it highly. My only complaint
> is that the manual and the built-in
> documentation are hard to use -- there
> aren't enough examples, and the
> discussion of one topic often assumes
> knowledge of some other topic, but it's
> hard to find the information on the
> other topic.
It does not support incremental plotting. Creating a
'publication-quality' graph is next to impossible. And it
is omnipresent ... probably due to a lack of any advanced
free graph plotting tool/language (i.e. a free equivalent of
IDL).
very good, mature software
This is very good, mature software. I recommend it highly. My only complaint is that the manual and the built-in documentation are hard to use -- there aren't enough examples, and the discussion of one topic often assumes knowledge of some other topic, but it's hard to find the information on the other topic.