Gnuplots

Gnuplots is a term commonly used to refer to plots produced by the GNUPlot plotting utility, a portable, command-line driven graphing program used for data visualization across scientific and engineering disciplines. The program, often invoked as gnuplot, provides a scripting language and interactive interface for creating two- and three-dimensional plots, as well as more specialized representations such as parametric, polar, and histogram plots.

GNUPlot was originally created in the mid-1980s by Thomas Williams and Colin Kelley and has since been maintained by a community of volunteers. It is distributed under a GNU General Public License and runs on a wide range of platforms, including Unix-like systems, Windows, and macOS. The software supports a large set of output formats through its terminal drivers, enabling exports to PNG, SVG, PDF, EPS, PostScript, JPEG, and more, as well as interactive windows on several environments.

Key capabilities include handling multiple data sets from plain text files, data blocks, or function definitions; applying a variety of styles for lines, points, and fills; and performing mathematical transformations and data processing within scripts. Gnuplots can be used in fully scripted workflows or interactively, and it can be integrated into pipelines or embedded in other programming environments through its command language or via data piping.

Typical usage involves writing a script that configures the terminal and output, sets labels and titles, and issues plot commands to render data or functions. Its broad feature set makes it a common tool for researchers preparing publication-quality figures. See the official GNUPlot project for documentation and examples.