gnuplot is an open source 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.
This is software for making 2D and 3D graphs from data and functions. gnuplot supports many output formats, including drivers for many printers, (La)TeX, (x)fig, Postscript, and much more.
gnuplot can produce output directly on screen, or in many formats of graphics files, including PNG, EPS, SVG, JPEG and many others. It’s also capable of producing LaTeX code that can be included directly in LaTeX documents, making use of LaTeX’s fonts and powerful formulae abilities. The program can be used both interactively and in batch mode using scripts.
Its data files and self-defined functions can be manipulated by internal C-like language. It can also perform smoothing, spline-fitting, or nonlinear fits, as well as working with complex numbers.
gnuplot is used as the plotting engine of GNU Octave, Maxima and gretl, and it can be used from various scripting languages, including Perl, Python, Ruby and Smalltalk.
Key Features
- Plots any number of functions, built up of C operators, C library functions, library functions, and some things C doesn’t have like **, sgn(), etc. It also has support for plotting data files, to compare actual data to theoretical curves.
- User-defined X and Y ranges (optional auto-ranging), smart axes scaling, smart tic marks.
- TeX-like text formatting for labels, titles, axes, data points.
- User-defined constants and functions.
- Shell escapes and command line substitution.
- Load and save capability.
- Output redirection.
- All computations performed in the complex domain.
- Good support and documentation.
Website: www.gnuplot.info
Support: Documentation, FAQ
Developer: Thomas Williams, Colin Kelley, Russell Lang, Dave Kotz, John Campbell, Gershon Elber, Alexander Woo and many others
License: Open Source
gnuplot is mature software. It has been supported and under active development since 1986.
gnuplot is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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