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Ethan A Merritt
Fredrick Brennan
Tatsuro MATSUOKA
Read Me
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.netIt 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=2055The 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.
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