developerWorks: Visualize Your Data with Gnuplot

Gnuplot is a freely distributed plotting tool with ports
available for nearly every major platform. It can be operated in
one of two modes: when you need to adjust and prettify a graph to
‘get it just right,’ you can operate it in interactive mode by
issuing commands at the gnuplot prompt. Alternately, gnuplot can
read commands from a file and produce graphs in batch mode.
Batch-mode capability is especially useful if you are running a
series of experiments and need to view graphs of the results after
each run, for example; or when you need to return to a graph to
modify some aspect long after the graph was originally generated.
While it is hard to capture the mouse-clicks that you would use to
prettify a graph in a WYSIWIG editor, you can easily save gnuplot
commands in a file and load them up to re-execute in an interactive
session six months later.

“Gnuplot was originally developed in 1986 by Colin Kelley and
Thomas Williams. A number of contributors added support for
different ‘terminals,’ creating variants. In 1989 and 1990, these
were merged into gnuplot 2.0. And in April 2004, version 4.0 was
announced. This tutorial will apply to version 4.0, but most of the
commands introduced here should apply to other versions as well.
Where possible, I will mention the major differences…”

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