Gnuplot

Gnuplot
Orzetto~commonswiki · CC BY-SA 3.0 · source
Name	Gnuplot
Developer	William E. Jensen, Thomas Williams
Released	1986
Operating system	Unix-like, Microsoft Windows, macOS
Genre	Plotting, Data visualization
License	Public-domain-like / permissive

Gnuplot Gnuplot is a command-driven plotting utility used for producing 2D and 3D graphs from data and functions. It is widely used in scientific computing, engineering, and academic research, and integrates with numerous tools and languages for automation and batch processing. Gnuplot supports interactive terminals, file output, and scripting, making it useful alongside Fortran, C++, Python, MATLAB and R workflows.

History

Gnuplot was first written in 1986 by Thomas Williams and later maintained with contributions from Colin Kelley, John Camp, and others. It emerged contemporaneously with plotting utilities like MATLAB and visualization projects associated with National Center for Atmospheric Research and academic groups at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Over decades the project interfaced with developments in X Window System, PostScript, and printing pipelines used by organizations such as American Institute of Physics and universities including Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University. The tool evolved through support for new terminals, increased scripting capabilities, and community extensions influenced by conventions from TeX, LaTeX, and printing standards used by publishers like IEEE and Springer Science+Business Media.

Features

Gnuplot offers plotting of mathematical functions, data sets, and parametric equations with support for multiple plot styles and curve fitting. It includes capabilities for 3D surface plotting with shading and contouring similar to visualizations produced by Wolfram Research and Visualization Toolkit workflows. The utility supports annotations, axis manipulation, logarithmic and polar scales, and palettes used in publications by Nature (journal), Science (journal), and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Output customization aligns with standards of American Chemical Society and Royal Society of Chemistry figures. Gnuplot's layering, multiplot layouts, and error-bar handling enable replication of graphics seen in reports from institutions like NASA and European Space Agency.

Usage and Syntax

Users invoke Gnuplot interactively or run scripts with commands such as set, plot, splot, and fit, mirroring command paradigms found in tools used at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The syntax allows inline functions, datafile indexing, and column selection compatible with datasets from facilities such as CERN and experiments documented by American Physical Society. Script files integrate with build systems and notebooks used at Harvard University and University of California, Berkeley and can be embedded in workflows coordinated by GNU Make and CMake. Example constructs draw on conventions from languages like C and utilities distributed via Debian and Red Hat Enterprise Linux repositories.

Supported Output Formats and Terminals

Gnuplot supports a wide array of terminals and file formats, including raster outputs like PNG and JPEG used by Adobe Systems publications, vector formats like Encapsulated PostScript and PDF used by American Mathematical Society journals, and screen-oriented terminals using X Window System and Wayland for environments at University of Cambridge and University of Oxford. It can produce SVG compatible with World Wide Web Consortium and integrate with printers relying on PostScript pipelines. Terminals also enable integration with windowing environments on Microsoft Windows and macOS and headless rendering in server contexts like those operated by Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform.

Scripting and Programming Interfaces

Gnuplot is commonly used with scripting languages and bindings, including interfaces for Python (via drivers and wrappers), Perl, Ruby, and Tcl. It is often called from numerical libraries in Fortran and C++ simulations run at institutions such as Argonne National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Integration adapters exist for interactive environments like Jupyter Notebook and documentation tools used by GitHub and GitLab. Automation through shell scripting ties into ecosystems of GNU Bash and continuous integration systems like Jenkins and Travis CI.

Development and Licensing

Development has been community-driven with maintainers coordinating via mailing lists and repositories hosted on platforms used by projects such as GNU Project and contributors from companies and universities including IBM and Intel. The licensing is permissive and historically treated as public-domain-like, enabling inclusion in distributions maintained by Debian and Fedora Project while avoiding copyleft constraints of GNU General Public License. Contributions and patches follow collaborative models similar to those at OpenBSD and FreeBSD projects.

Category:Plotting software Category:Scientific software