Introduction

 

This document is written for you, the new user of gnuplot. Its goal is to show you how to use gnuplot to produce a variety of plots. For full details on commands and options, you are referred to the gnuplot manual. See also Section  for other sources of information.

gnuplot is a command-line driven interactive plotting program. It is very easy to use (it actually has only two commands for creating plots: plot and splot), yet it is very powerful. It can produce several different kinds of plots with many options for customizing them, and can send the result to a wide range of graphic devices (graphics terminals, printers, or plotters).

To give you some idea of the capabilities of gnuplot, here are some of the things that one can do with the program:

• Univariate data series plots (e.g. time series)
• Simple plots of built-in or user-defined functions (including step functions) in either Cartesian or polar coordinates
• Scatter plots of bivariate data, with errorbar options
• Bar graphs
• Three-dimensional surface plots of functions like z=f(x,y), with options for hidden line removal, view angles, and contour lines
• Three-dimensional scatter plots of trivariate data
• Two- and three-dimensional plots of parametric functions
• Plot data directly from tables created by other applications
• Re-generate plots on a variety of other graphic devices

An example of a plot created in gnuplot is shown in Figure .

  
Figure: An example of plot produced by gnuplot.

In the following sections, you will learn how to do all of the above (and some more) in gnuplot.