Gnuplot needs libgd library to support graphics output formats like PNG.
X11 should be installed on your computer (From Mac OSX install DVD). Here is an additional comment to JIMCLARK01's tips to compile gnuplot 4.4.2 under Snow Leopard (Mac OS X.6) with PNG, JPEG output available : Gnuplot is easily extensible to include new devices. Gnuplot supports many different types of terminals: interactive screen terminals (with mouse and hotkey functionality), pen plotters (like hpgl), printers (including postscript and many color devices), and printings to output file as vectorial pseudo-devices like LaTeX, metafont, pdf, svg, or bitmap png. It supports color or grayscale surfaces and maps, even for non-equidistant and non-rectangular 3D data, otherwise it offers data gridding. In 3D, it supports line, point and dot surfaces, with or without hidden line removal. In 2D, it can draw line, point, dot, box, histogram graphs or vector fields. Gnuplot is developed and supported since 1986, and having its scripts and commands easy to understand text files, it is time-portable as well.
It does this job pretty well, and in addition it serves as non-interactive plotting engine for miscellaneous portable third-party applications, like Octave. It was originally intended as graphical program which would allow scientists and students to visualize mathematical functions and data.
The software is copyrighted but freely distributed (i.e., you don't have to pay for it).
Program to write data files and execution files that run the plotting software gnuplot from a C Upon mouse click, terminating GNUPLOT, the program execution resumes at that point. Which directs GNUPLOT to execute the commands in the file commands.gplot. This tells the program to stop at that point, and issue the system command (UNIX command in this case) During the execution of the program, the system directive is issued We show the first few and last few lines: Then the program writes a datafile fn.dat which consists of x and yĬoordinates along the graph of the function in sequence. You can call up GNUPLOT and enter the same instructions at the gnuplot> prompt. Then the display is to show until the window is overclicked by mouse. "with lines" and to plot the function y = 0, the horizontal axis. This will tell GNUPLOT to plot the points listed in the file called fn.dat and to connect them The program writes a file commands.gplot of GNUPLOT instructions Using recursion, and plot it over several periods using the GNUPLOT. We take our solution of Problem 3b, a program for a periodic function We use C to generateĭata and command files to run the graphics package GNUPLOT.
Here is a way to get graphical output from C.
In case you would like to learn more about it, there is a manual on line GNUPLOT is an easy-to-use software package for plotting functions in two and three dimansions. Fifteenth Week Examples Fifteenth Week Examples -ĭriving a Graphics Program (GNUPLOT) from C