9 ms·

Gnuplotting – Create scientific plots using gnuplot

162 points by type0 10y ago

capnrefsmmat 10y ago
How widely used is Gnuplot these days? In my community (statistics), I haven't heard of anyone using it at all, just people using Matplotlib, ggplot2, or R base graphics. I used Gnuplot five or ten years ago when I barely knew of anything else, but I don't have a sense of what its advantages are these days.
- raziel2701 10y ago
  I was wondering the exact same thing. I'm in condensed matter and gnuplot is seen as a relic more than anything else. Most people in my field use origin, matlab or python.
  - 77pt77 10y ago
    >Most people in my field use origin I'm surprised origin is still used. I used it some 20 years ago.
  - TZVdosOWs3kZHus 10y ago
    Matlab uses Gnuplot.
    - kgwgk 10y ago
      What do you mean?
      - TZVdosOWs3kZHus 10y ago
        My mistake, they only share some syntax.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- dima55 10y ago
  I use gnuplot heavily. It was good 20 years ago, and it's good today. The problem with people rewriting the wheel, is that every new wheel misses lots of features from the tool they're trying to replace, and does many things differently for no good reason. The efforts of the matlotlib, ggplot2 (and so on) would have been much more usefully spent contributing to gnuplot. Instead we have a large number of half-assed tools instead of 1 truly great one.
  - cvwright 10y ago
    I guess I have to disagree. > It was good 20 years ago, and it's good today. I wasn't using such things 20 years ago, but 10 years ago gnuplot was a crufty relic and a right pain in the bum to use for anything beyond the most basic of plots. Together with LaTeX, it was one of the things that made getting into CS research much more difficult than necessary. We need fewer barriers to entry in this field, not more. Also, a fun fact: gnuplot is not GNU. It has this weird custom license that disallows distribution of modified versions and is incompatible with the GPL. http://gnuplot.cvs.sourceforge.net/gnuplot/gnuplot/Copyright?view=markup http://gnuplot.cvs.sourceforge.net/gnuplot/gnuplot/Copyright... I used to wonder how something so old could be so bad, and how newer projects like matplotlib managed to race ahead of it. I think the license explains a lot. Edit: I should add - if gnuplot works for you, more power to you! Use what works. But I've been much happier since I discovered matplotlib in about 2006.
    - dima55 10y ago
      You can distribute the modifications in patches; i.e. what all the distros already do anyway. As for matplotlib, there's no reason at all for it to be making plots. It just needed to provide a plotting interface to numpy, and the backend is almost irrelevant. They could EASILY have reused existing tools for the backend, and contributed upstream to fix whatever deficiencies they thought existed.
      - jofer 10y ago
        No. The whole point of matplotlib is interactivity and embedability in GUI toolkits. There was nothing else that meet those criteria in Python at the time, and the other options were GUI toolkit specific. Try finding something else that you can seamlessly embed in Tk, Gtk, Qt, Wx, etc with full interactivity that still creates publication quality static plots.
- enriquto 10y ago
  I use it daily for my work. It fits much better in the unix environment than other tools,
  - TZVdosOWs3kZHus 10y ago
    Me too. When you start handling huge amounts of data, Gnuplot starts to warm up where other tools break. It is fast as hell.
    - keenerd 10y ago
      Gnuplot dies when fed hundreds of megabytes of data. At some point you have to start making your own tools. Here's an example: http://kmkeen.com/rtl-power/tholin_rtlsdr.png http://kmkeen.com/rtl-power/tholin_rtlsdr.png Every pixel is a datapoint. There are only 1.5M values in that render (3-tuples of time, frequency and intensity) but the resolution of that chart is pretty low. People casually do charts a hundred times larger. Then you start running into other problems, like sharing the images. Firefox won't display images wider/taller than 32k px for example.
      - dman 10y ago
        What tool is used for this?
      - 1_player 10y ago
        Hey that's a really interesting chart! Do you mind if I post it on /r/dataisbeautiful ? Is there an accompanying article?
- arnsholt 10y ago
  I've used it for all the plots in my thesis. AFAIK, it's the only plotting library that does what gnuplot's epslatex terminal does: graphical elements are placed in an EPS file, while textual elements are placed as TeX, letting me have exactly the same fonts and sizes in the plots and in the rest of the thesis.
  - TZVdosOWs3kZHus 10y ago
    The possibility of making later (small) adjustments in the tex-file is one huge advantage.
- jabl 10y ago
  Same here. I was a somewhat heavy user of gnuplot and Grace (http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/ http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/ , anybody remember that one, heh?), but what caused me to abandon them was that I needed much more than a plotting program. I made myself a python-based workflow/analysis environment, where I slurped in the results of simulations, did various munging on the data, some (somewhat custom) regression fits, generation of input data to other simulations etc. And yes, on-screen and later on publication quality plots too. matplotlib was a godsend here, really. Sure, I could have coded up some gnuplot/grace interface (say, generate input files and shelling out to the program), but, ugh, why?
- julienchastang 10y ago
  I really like gnuplot as a nice, lightweight alternative to matplotlib. Plus, it has great emacs, org-mode, babel integration. gnuplotting is an impressive resource and I had no idea plots could get so sophisticated with different earth projections, for example.
rar_ram 10y ago
I used to use this to analyze ab load testing results. After ipython notebooks (mathplotlib) , its been a long time, since I have looked into this.
xioxox 10y ago
I'd recommend my Veusz scientific plotting package if you want a free scriptable GUI plotting tool. It's much easier to use than the aged gnuplot and is more flexible for 2D plotting (3D is coming!) http://home.gna.org/veusz/ http://home.gna.org/veusz/
- robochat42 10y ago
  I keep meaning to use Veusz more. I'd also to really try out kst properly https://kst-plot.kde.org https://kst-plot.kde.org
mivade 10y ago
I was a loyal Gnuplot user for many years until I got fed up with a bug where tick labels wouldn't be centered with ticks in LaTeX output without some manual hacks. I can see from one of the posts that this issue still exists. Plus it was easier to just do everything in Python and not have to use a separate process to plot in the end. Nevertheless, I still find it useful. Nothing else seems as easy to quickly plot an analytical function: `gnuplot -p -e "sin(x)"`
- dandelion_lover 10y ago
  In my experience, if you send the bugs to their bug tracker they are immediately corrected and/or a workaround is suggested. The devs are very helpful.
otobrglez 10y ago
I've used GNU Plot to create this lovely 3D animation of my running data (GPS tracks). https://vimeo.com/96479940 https://vimeo.com/96479940 Some Ruby scripting and ffmpeg was also involved. Here is the code - https://github.com/otobrglez/movement https://github.com/otobrglez/movement
exDM69 10y ago
I've been using GNUplot in a recent project of mine and it has really been a nice experience. The project is a toolkit for Orbital mechanics written in C. There's a test framework that generates a physical scenario, say two satellites colliding in orbit, and then goes on to solve some difficult problem, like find when and where a collision occurs. I've been dumping the initial situation, some auxiliary variables and the steps taken by the algorithm to simple text files and then plotting it out with GNUplot. Sure there are a lot of alternatives, but I really didn't want to embed anything in my C program or start writing a separate plotting tool in another language. GNUplot isn't great in interactive 3d plots but it works. For 2d plots, doing some derivatives and displaying the algorithm steps, it has worked great. Not a pretty tool, but it does the job and I don't really know of a better tool for my use. For ad-hoc plots, I have some key bindings in my $EDITOR for executing GNUplot. For more complex cases, I run it with a Makefile.
- dima55 10y ago
  Look at this: https://github.com/dkogan/feedgnuplot https://github.com/dkogan/feedgnuplot It is magical
  - exDM69 10y ago
    Thanks! I've been looking for something like this for some other projects with real time data.
- filmor 10y ago
  Minor nitpick, but it's "gnuplot" (a pun on the Newplot), the program is not affiliated with GNU in any way. It's not even licensed under the GPL.
  - dTal 10y ago
    Wow I didn't know this. And apparently you cant even redistribute modified source, only patchsets (like Minix) meaning it can't easily be forked. Bit scandalous that something that brands itself "gnu" isn't even free software by GNU standards.
acz 10y ago
Here is a nice video on the new Matlab palette, and why it could be better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU
geff82 10y ago
Gnuplot is one of the reasons that makes me love the open source/Unix world every time I use it. Writing a plot in code, embedding it in LaTeX... all while having the fingers on the keyboard. You get connected to your machine like that.
jeena 10y ago
Oh yeah, those were the days where we plotted graphs for our bachelor thesis where we were showing how many messages and clients our generic game server written in Erlang and the V8 js-engine could handle: https://jeena.net/t/GGS.pdf https://jeena.net/t/GGS.pdf page 40 pp
z3t4 10y ago
Should be possible to create interactive svg's
piedradura 10y ago
maxima and wxmaxima computer algebra software are using gnuplot.
jeroenjanssens 10y ago
If you're using LaTeX anyway, then you might be interested in TikZ [1]. This repo [2] contains some of the figure I created for my thesis. [1] http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/feature/plotting/ http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/feature/plotting/ [2] https://github.com/jeroenjanssens/phd-thesis https://github.com/jeroenjanssens/phd-thesis
- leephillips 10y ago
  Beautiful use of TikZ there! Thanks for sharing!
- 0x54MUR41 10y ago
  I use Tikz too for plotting on LaTeX. The result is really nice. By the way, thank you for sharing.
- davrosthedalek 10y ago
  gnuplot has a tikz terminal! So now you can have a paper with citation links in the figure's keys. Really neat, but too much for most publishers and their publishing software solution.

162 points by type0 10y ago

How widely used is Gnuplot these days? In my community (statistics), I haven't heard of anyone using it at all, just people using Matplotlib, ggplot2, or R base graphics. I used Gnuplot five or ten years ago when I barely knew of anything else, but I don't have a sense of what its advantages are these days.

raziel2701 10y ago
I was wondering the exact same thing. I'm in condensed matter and gnuplot is seen as a relic more than anything else. Most people in my field use origin, matlab or python.
- 77pt77 10y ago
  >Most people in my field use origin I'm surprised origin is still used. I used it some 20 years ago.
- TZVdosOWs3kZHus 10y ago
  Matlab uses Gnuplot.
  - kgwgk 10y ago
    What do you mean?
    - TZVdosOWs3kZHus 10y ago
      My mistake, they only share some syntax.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
dima55 10y ago
I use gnuplot heavily. It was good 20 years ago, and it's good today. The problem with people rewriting the wheel, is that every new wheel misses lots of features from the tool they're trying to replace, and does many things differently for no good reason. The efforts of the matlotlib, ggplot2 (and so on) would have been much more usefully spent contributing to gnuplot. Instead we have a large number of half-assed tools instead of 1 truly great one.
- cvwright 10y ago
  I guess I have to disagree. > It was good 20 years ago, and it's good today. I wasn't using such things 20 years ago, but 10 years ago gnuplot was a crufty relic and a right pain in the bum to use for anything beyond the most basic of plots. Together with LaTeX, it was one of the things that made getting into CS research much more difficult than necessary. We need fewer barriers to entry in this field, not more. Also, a fun fact: gnuplot is not GNU. It has this weird custom license that disallows distribution of modified versions and is incompatible with the GPL. http://gnuplot.cvs.sourceforge.net/gnuplot/gnuplot/Copyright?view=markup http://gnuplot.cvs.sourceforge.net/gnuplot/gnuplot/Copyright... I used to wonder how something so old could be so bad, and how newer projects like matplotlib managed to race ahead of it. I think the license explains a lot. Edit: I should add - if gnuplot works for you, more power to you! Use what works. But I've been much happier since I discovered matplotlib in about 2006.
  - dima55 10y ago
    You can distribute the modifications in patches; i.e. what all the distros already do anyway. As for matplotlib, there's no reason at all for it to be making plots. It just needed to provide a plotting interface to numpy, and the backend is almost irrelevant. They could EASILY have reused existing tools for the backend, and contributed upstream to fix whatever deficiencies they thought existed.
    - jofer 10y ago
      No. The whole point of matplotlib is interactivity and embedability in GUI toolkits. There was nothing else that meet those criteria in Python at the time, and the other options were GUI toolkit specific. Try finding something else that you can seamlessly embed in Tk, Gtk, Qt, Wx, etc with full interactivity that still creates publication quality static plots.
enriquto 10y ago
I use it daily for my work. It fits much better in the unix environment than other tools,
- TZVdosOWs3kZHus 10y ago
  Me too. When you start handling huge amounts of data, Gnuplot starts to warm up where other tools break. It is fast as hell.
  - keenerd 10y ago
    Gnuplot dies when fed hundreds of megabytes of data. At some point you have to start making your own tools. Here's an example: http://kmkeen.com/rtl-power/tholin_rtlsdr.png http://kmkeen.com/rtl-power/tholin_rtlsdr.png Every pixel is a datapoint. There are only 1.5M values in that render (3-tuples of time, frequency and intensity) but the resolution of that chart is pretty low. People casually do charts a hundred times larger. Then you start running into other problems, like sharing the images. Firefox won't display images wider/taller than 32k px for example.
    - dman 10y ago
      What tool is used for this?
    - 1_player 10y ago
      Hey that's a really interesting chart! Do you mind if I post it on /r/dataisbeautiful ? Is there an accompanying article?
arnsholt 10y ago
I've used it for all the plots in my thesis. AFAIK, it's the only plotting library that does what gnuplot's epslatex terminal does: graphical elements are placed in an EPS file, while textual elements are placed as TeX, letting me have exactly the same fonts and sizes in the plots and in the rest of the thesis.
- TZVdosOWs3kZHus 10y ago
  The possibility of making later (small) adjustments in the tex-file is one huge advantage.
jabl 10y ago
Same here. I was a somewhat heavy user of gnuplot and Grace (http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/ http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/ , anybody remember that one, heh?), but what caused me to abandon them was that I needed much more than a plotting program. I made myself a python-based workflow/analysis environment, where I slurped in the results of simulations, did various munging on the data, some (somewhat custom) regression fits, generation of input data to other simulations etc. And yes, on-screen and later on publication quality plots too. matplotlib was a godsend here, really. Sure, I could have coded up some gnuplot/grace interface (say, generate input files and shelling out to the program), but, ugh, why?
julienchastang 10y ago
I really like gnuplot as a nice, lightweight alternative to matplotlib. Plus, it has great emacs, org-mode, babel integration. gnuplotting is an impressive resource and I had no idea plots could get so sophisticated with different earth projections, for example.

rar_ram 10y ago

I used to use this to analyze ab load testing results. After ipython notebooks (mathplotlib) , its been a long time, since I have looked into this.

xioxox 10y ago

I'd recommend my Veusz scientific plotting package if you want a free scriptable GUI plotting tool. It's much easier to use than the aged gnuplot and is more flexible for 2D plotting (3D is coming!) http://home.gna.org/veusz/ http://home.gna.org/veusz/

robochat42 10y ago
I keep meaning to use Veusz more. I'd also to really try out kst properly https://kst-plot.kde.org https://kst-plot.kde.org

mivade 10y ago

I was a loyal Gnuplot user for many years until I got fed up with a bug where tick labels wouldn't be centered with ticks in LaTeX output without some manual hacks. I can see from one of the posts that this issue still exists. Plus it was easier to just do everything in Python and not have to use a separate process to plot in the end. Nevertheless, I still find it useful. Nothing else seems as easy to quickly plot an analytical function: `gnuplot -p -e "sin(x)"`

dandelion_lover 10y ago
In my experience, if you send the bugs to their bug tracker they are immediately corrected and/or a workaround is suggested. The devs are very helpful.

otobrglez 10y ago

I've used GNU Plot to create this lovely 3D animation of my running data (GPS tracks). https://vimeo.com/96479940 https://vimeo.com/96479940 Some Ruby scripting and ffmpeg was also involved. Here is the code - https://github.com/otobrglez/movement https://github.com/otobrglez/movement

exDM69 10y ago

I've been using GNUplot in a recent project of mine and it has really been a nice experience. The project is a toolkit for Orbital mechanics written in C. There's a test framework that generates a physical scenario, say two satellites colliding in orbit, and then goes on to solve some difficult problem, like find when and where a collision occurs. I've been dumping the initial situation, some auxiliary variables and the steps taken by the algorithm to simple text files and then plotting it out with GNUplot. Sure there are a lot of alternatives, but I really didn't want to embed anything in my C program or start writing a separate plotting tool in another language. GNUplot isn't great in interactive 3d plots but it works. For 2d plots, doing some derivatives and displaying the algorithm steps, it has worked great. Not a pretty tool, but it does the job and I don't really know of a better tool for my use. For ad-hoc plots, I have some key bindings in my $EDITOR for executing GNUplot. For more complex cases, I run it with a Makefile.

dima55 10y ago
Look at this: https://github.com/dkogan/feedgnuplot https://github.com/dkogan/feedgnuplot It is magical
- exDM69 10y ago
  Thanks! I've been looking for something like this for some other projects with real time data.
filmor 10y ago
Minor nitpick, but it's "gnuplot" (a pun on the Newplot), the program is not affiliated with GNU in any way. It's not even licensed under the GPL.
- dTal 10y ago
  Wow I didn't know this. And apparently you cant even redistribute modified source, only patchsets (like Minix) meaning it can't easily be forked. Bit scandalous that something that brands itself "gnu" isn't even free software by GNU standards.

acz 10y ago

Here is a nice video on the new Matlab palette, and why it could be better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU

geff82 10y ago

Gnuplot is one of the reasons that makes me love the open source/Unix world every time I use it. Writing a plot in code, embedding it in LaTeX... all while having the fingers on the keyboard. You get connected to your machine like that.

jeena 10y ago

Oh yeah, those were the days where we plotted graphs for our bachelor thesis where we were showing how many messages and clients our generic game server written in Erlang and the V8 js-engine could handle: https://jeena.net/t/GGS.pdf https://jeena.net/t/GGS.pdf page 40 pp

z3t4 10y ago

Should be possible to create interactive svg's

piedradura 10y ago

maxima and wxmaxima computer algebra software are using gnuplot.

jeroenjanssens 10y ago

If you're using LaTeX anyway, then you might be interested in TikZ [1]. This repo [2] contains some of the figure I created for my thesis. [1] http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/feature/plotting/ http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/feature/plotting/ [2] https://github.com/jeroenjanssens/phd-thesis https://github.com/jeroenjanssens/phd-thesis

leephillips 10y ago
Beautiful use of TikZ there! Thanks for sharing!
0x54MUR41 10y ago
I use Tikz too for plotting on LaTeX. The result is really nice. By the way, thank you for sharing.
davrosthedalek 10y ago
gnuplot has a tikz terminal! So now you can have a paper with citation links in the figure's keys. Really neat, but too much for most publishers and their publishing software solution.