Gnuplot is a command-line based utility for creating graphs. It runs on major operating system flavors including Windows, Linux and MacOS. It is free and open-source. It can create 2D and 3D graphs in various output formats including pdf, png, gif, jpeg, LaTeX, svg and even HTML5!
But why use gnuplot when you can create graphs in Excel?
- Excel graphs are raster images (e.g. JPEG).
- Excel graphs have only limited customization.
- Excel cannot process external data files.
- Excel is designed for financial functions it is not suitable for scientific works.
How to download and install gnuplot on Windows?
- Download it from https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuplot/files/.
- The downloaded ZIP file would look like gp426win32.zip, extract it in My Documents.
- To run it, open the file wgnuplot from C:/Documents and Settings/username/My Documents/gnuplot/bin
How to download and install gnuplot on Ubuntu?
1. Open terminal and type: apt-get install gnuplot. It will install gnuplot for you.
2. To run it, open terminal and type command gnuplot.
Plotting your first graph using gnuplot
Open gnuplot, type plot sin(x) and press enter key. Done! You just plotted your first graph using gnuplot.
In upcoming posts, I will try to elaborate on plotting. If you cannot wait, you can directly try these plotting demos.
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