gnuplot Cookbook

Over 80 recipes to visually explore the full range of features

of the world's preeminent open source graphing system

Lee Phillips

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
gnuplot Cookbook

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First published: February 2012

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 Credits

Author Project Coordinator

Lee Phillips Kushal Bhardwaj

Reviewers Proofreader
Andreas Bernauer Joanna McMahon
David Millán Escrivá
Indexers
Acquisition Editor Tejal Daruwale
Usha Iyer Hemangini Bari

Lead Technical Editor Production Coordinator

Dayan Hyames Melwyn D'sa

Technical Editors Cover Work

Sonali Tharwani Melwyn D'sa
Vishal D’souza

Copy Editor
Laxmi Subramanian
 About the Author

Lee Phillips grew up on the 17th floor of a public housing project on the Lower East Side of
Manhattan. He attended Stuyvesant High School and Hampshire College, where he studied
Physics, Mathematics, and Music. He received a Ph.D. in 1987 from Dartmouth in theoretical
and computational physics for research in fluid dynamics. After completing postdoctoral work
in plasma physics, Dr. Phillips was hired by the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC,
where he worked on various problems, including the NIKE laser fusion project. Dr. Phillips is
now the Chief Scientist of the Alogus Research Corporation, which conducts research in the
physical sciences and provides technology assessment for investors.

I am grateful to the users of my gnuplot web pages for their interest,

questions, and suggestions over the years, and to my family for their
patience and support.
 About the Reviewers

Andreas Bernauer is a Software Engineer at Active Group in Germany. He graduated at

Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany, with a Degree in Bioinformatics and received
a Master of Science degree in Genetics from the University of Connecticut, USA. In 2011, he
earned a doctorate in Computer Engineering from Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen.

Andreas has more than 10 years of professional experience in software engineering.

He implemented the server-side scripting engine in the scheme-based SUnet web server,
hosted the Learning-Classifier-System workshops in Tübingen. He has been the reviewer
for numerous scientific articles, research proposals, and books, and has been a judge in the
German Federal Competition in Computer Science on several occasions. His main interests
are functional programming and machine-learning algorithms.

David Millán Escrivá was 8 years old when he wrote his first program on 8086 PC with
Basic language. He has more than 10 years of experience in IT. He has worked on computer
vision, computer graphics, and pattern recognition. Currently he is working on different
projects about computer vision and AR.

I would like to thank Izanskun and my daughter Eider.

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 Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: Plotting Curves, Boxes, Points, and more 7
Introduction 8
Plotting a function 8
Plotting multiple curves 10
Using two different y-axes 11
Making a scatterplot 13
Plotting boxes 14
Plotting circles 16
Drawing filled curves 17
Handling financial data 20
Making a basic histogram plot 21
Stacking histograms 22
Plotting multiple histograms 24
Dealing with errors 25
Making a statistical whisker plot 27
Making an impulse plot 29
Graphing parametric curves 31
Plotting with polar coordinates 32
Chapter 2: Annotating with Labels and Legends 35
Introduction 35
Labeling the axes 36
Setting the label size 38
Adding a legend 40
Putting a box around the legend 43
Adding a label with an arrow 44
Using Unicode characters [new] 46
Putting equations in your labels 47
Table of Contents
Chapter 3: Applying Colors and Styles 51
Introduction 51
Coloring your curves 52
Styling your curves 54
Applying transparency [new] 56
Plotting points with curves 57
Changing the point style 58
Changing the plot size 60
Positioning graphs on the page [new] 61
Plotting with objects [new] 62
Chapter 4: Controlling your Tics 65
Introduction 65
Adding minor tics 66
Placing tics on the second y-axis 67
Adjusting the tic size 68
Removing all tics 69
Defining the tic values 71
Making the tics stick out 72
Setting manual tics 73
Plotting with dates and times 76
Changing the language used for labels [new] 78
Using European-style decimals [new] 79
Formatting tic labels 80
Chapter 5: Combining Multiple Plots 83
Introduction 83
Arranging an array of plots 84
Positioning plots manually 85
Creating an inset plot 87
Multiplotting with labels and arrows 89
Chapter 6: Including Plots in Documents 93
Introduction 93
Introducing gnuplot's high-quality graphics formats [new] 94
Adding a plot to a paper using LaTeX 97
Assembling a document using TikZ and LaTeX [new] 99
Assembling a document using epslatex 103
Using gnuplot within LaTeX 106
Creating presentation slides with incrementally displayed graphs 108
Including a plot in a web page 112
Making an interactive plot for the Web [new] 114

ii
 Table of Contents

Chapter 7: Programming gnuplot and Dealing with Data 117

Introduction 118
Scripting gnuplot with its own language 118
Plotting on subintervals 121
Smoothing your data 123
Fitting functions to your data 124
Using kdensity smoothing to improve on histograms [new] 126
Creating a cumulative distribution [new] 127
Talking to gnuplot with C 128
Scripting gnuplot with Python 129
Plotting with Clojure 131
Handling volatile data [new] 132
Chapter 8: The Third Dimension 135
Introduction 135
Making a surface plot 136
Using coordinate mappings 139
Coloring the surface 141
Making a contour plot 144
Making a vector plot 147
Making an image plot or heat map 149
Combining contours and images 152
Combining surfaces with images 153
Plotting a path in 3D 157
Drawing parametric surfaces 158
Chapter 9: Using and Making Graphical User Interfaces 161
Introduction 161
Using the Java gnuplot GUI JGP 162
Using the Emacs GUI 164
Sharing with Plotshare 166
Writing a web GUI for gnuplot 168
Chapter 10: Surveying Special Topics 175
Introduction 175
Avoiding overlapping labels 176
Plotting labels from files 178
Mapping the Earth 180
Making a labeled contour plot 183
Softening the axes 184
Putting arrows on the axes 186
Plotting with pictures 187
Breaking an axis 189
iii
Table of Contents

Fitting the grid to the data 192

Coloring the axes 193
Appendix: Finding Help and Information 197
Index 199

iv
 Preface
Why gnuplot?
gnuplot is a free, open source plotting program that has been in wide use since 1986.
It's used as the graphics backend by many other programs, so plenty of people use gnuplot
without knowing it. If you've used Octave, Maxima, statist, gretl, or the Emacs graphing
calculator, you've already used gnuplot.

gnuplot was originally designed to visualize scientific data, but its use has expanded to
encompass every domain where sophisticated and accurate plotting is required. gnuplot
is used in science, engineering, sociology, mapping, business, finance, and computer
systems and network monitoring.

gnuplot excels at complex 3D graphing with hidden-line removal and at the rendering
of surfaces and contours. It can produce almost any type of graph imaginable (except for
pie-charts—but it can be convinced to do this, too, as we'll show later!) for a dizzying array
of output devices, and can save plots in almost any type of common file format (and some
uncommon ones). It can be installed on any type of computer system you are likely to
encounter; there are binaries available for Windows and the sources can be compiled on
most reasonably modern machines. I have compiled the latest version (4.4) of gnuplot on
both Linux and Macintosh (OS X) computers and verified that all of its advanced features are
fully available on both of these architectures. The recipes in this book that illustrate features
newly appearing in version 4.4 are marked with [new].

gnuplot can easily be automated. It has its own scripting language and can be controlled from
many general-purpose programming languages. gnuplot can also be incorporated into various
publishing and document creation workflows to help create professional books, papers, and
online documents.