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Ethan A Merritt
Hans-Bernhard Broeker
Lars Hecking
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The Gnuplot Plotting Utility
============================
Gnuplot is a command-line driven interactive function plotting utility
for linux, OSX, MSWin, VMS, and many other platforms. The software is
copyrighted but freely distributed (i.e., you don't have to pay for it).
It was originally written to allow scientists and students to visualize
mathematical functions and data. Gnuplot supports output to many types
of terminals, printers, and file formats. It is easily extensible to
include new devices.
The "gnu" in gnuplot is NOT related to the Free Software Foundation.
The naming is just a coincidence (and a long story; see the gnuplot FAQ
for details). Thus gnuplot is not covered by the GPL (GNU Public License)
copyleft, but rather by its own copyright statement, included in all source
code files. Some code modules are dual-licensed.
Gnuplot handles both curves (2 dimensions) and surfaces (3 dimensions).
Surfaces can be plotted as a mesh fitting the specified function, floating
in the 3-d coordinate space, or as a contour plot on the x-y plane.
For 2-d plots, there are also many plot styles including lines, points,
boxes, heat maps, stacked histograms, and contoured projections of 3D data.
Graphs may be labeled with arbitrary labels and arrows, axis labels,
a title, date and time, and a key. The interface includes command-line
editing and history on most platforms.
The new gnuplot user should begin by reading the general information
available by typing `help` after running gnuplot. Then read about the
`plot` command (type `help plot`). The manual for gnuplot (which is a
nicely formatted version of the on-line help information) is available
as a PDF document, created via LaTeX. Look at the docs/Makefile
for other options for formatting the documentation.
The gnuplot source code and executables may be copied and/or modified
freely as long as the copyright messages are left intact.
Copyright and Porting
=====================
See the Copyright file for copyright conditions.
See the ChangeLog and docs/old/History.old file for changes to gnuplot.
Build instructions are in the INSTALL file. Some additional
information needed to port gnuplot to new platforms not covered by
GNU autoconf can be found in the PORTING file.
The code for gnuplot was written with portability in mind, and has been
run on an amazing variety of operating systems and hardware over the years.
However, the current code has not been tested on all those older platforms
and some of the conditional code to support quirks of obsolete compilers
and OS features has been removed. You can expect that gnuplot will compile
more or less out of the box on any system that has a c99 compliant C compiler.
Some optional drivers are written in C++ or lua.
Help and Bug Reports
====================
Your primary place to go searching for help with gnuplot should
be the project's webpage. At the time of this writing, that's
http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net
It has links to a lot of material, including the project's development
page, also at SourceForge:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuplot/
There are separate tracking systems for Feature Requests and proposed
patches that implement new features, also hosted at SourceForge.
All bug reports should include the version of gnuplot you are using,
the operating system and version you are running it on, and the output
device (gnuplot's "terminal") that you are plotting to. It helps a lot
to provide a simple script, possibly with data, that reproducibly
demonstrates the problem you are reporting.
Mailing Lists
=============
The gnuplot mailing lists are currently operated through the general
development site on SourceForge.net. Subscribe to mailing lists via
the web interface at
http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=2055
The lists you may be interested in are "gnuplot-info" and "gnuplot-beta".
"gnuplot-info" is for general discussion and questions about how to use
the program. "gnuplot-beta" is for discussion about possible new features,
plans for future work, release schedules, or other development issues.
----
-Thomas Williams-
-Alex Woo-
-David Denholm-
-Lars Hecking-
-Ethan Merritt-