Introduction and History

GNUPLOT was originally developed by Colin Kelley and Thomas Williams in 1986 to plot functions and data files on a variety of terminals. In 1988 and 1989 I created an alternate version, known as Gnu, that supported a new ``terminal type'' called latex, so gnuplot would output code. The plot could then be included in a document. I added a number of embellishments, supported only by the latex terminal, allowing the user to produce publication-quality plots.

In late 1989 and early 1990 Gnu and a number of other GNUPLOT variants were merged together into a new release of GNUPLOT, 2.0. This includes, among many other improvements, a driver derived from the one in Gnu. Former Gnu users are referred to Section 4 for information about adapting to GNUPLOT. Anyone interested in using GNUPLOT with should read the next section, a tutorial, and the primary GNUPLOT manual.

The reader should note that the picture environments output by GNUPLOT can be quite large and complicated, and can easily exceed the memory capacity of . If an enlarged version of is available, it is wise to use it. Otherwise, keep your plots simple and add \clearpage to your document where necessary.

There is also a new EEPIC driver (eepic), intended for use with the EEPIC macro package for . EEPIC allows for much more efficient line-drawing, runs through faster, and uses less memory. See Section 3 for more information.

There is a small package of auxiliary files (makefiles and scripts) that I find useful for making plots with GNUPLOT. This is available for ftp as pub/gnuplot-latex.shar from cs.duke.edu. I can mail copies (see the end of this paper for information).