Introduction

Introduction Chapters to Gnuplot

Plotting functions

Plotting data

Handling of Gnuplot’s output terminals

General notes

With Gnuplot you can create terrific plots that will be suited for a bunch of different applications for example scientific paper.
You can get Gnuplot from http://www.gnuplot.info, where you can find also a lot of documentation and examples.
Another helpful site I used to learn Gnuplot is the nice Not so Frequently Asked Questions site.

On these sites there exist already introductions to Gnuplot, but I want to do it in a slightly different way that concentrates on the way I’m using Gnuplot.
And this way means, that I will present no introduction to the interactive Gnuplot prompt, but will start directly with writing some text files. These files can then be executed by Gnuplot.

I have divided the introduction to three different chapters that can be read independently from another.It will start with plotting a sinusoid. In the second chapter the plotting is extended to data points. In the last long chapter different output files (png, svg, eps) are considered.

Note that all the plots on this site were done under Linux with Gnuplot 4.4.