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Gnuplot 4.0 Released

Posted by michael on from the disturbingly-useful dept.

RazorBlack writes "Almost a year and a half after Gnuplot's previous stable release (3.7.3), version 4.0 has arrived! It boasts quite a lot of very interesting new features, including interactive mouse control, coloured 2D maps and 3D surfaces, interpolation and more flexible data files. Science geeks rejoice!"

8 of 31 comments (clear)

  1. Sweet. GNUPlot rocks by gkelman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Just as I've been working for ages getting some groovy graphs drawn that I can't really do in MRTG, they release a new GNUPlot.

    Groovy.

    And it's Friday afternoon

  2. No pie for me by Masa · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Damn. Still no pie charts, because it "It's not possible in gnuplot" (as stated in the FAQ). How hard can it be? I like Gnuplot very much, but it seems that I still have to rely on self-made Tcl/Tk-script so I can bake myself some nice EPS pies.

    1. Re:No pie for me by dan+dan+the+dna+man · · Score: 2, Interesting

      R makes nice pies. mmm pie

      --
      I don't read your sig, why do you read mine?
  3. Topic misleading. by Executive+Override · · Score: 5, Informative

    Please note that despite it's name, gnuplot has nothing to do with the FSF and the GNU project. It's not even released under the GPL. In fact it's not even Free Software, since it's license doesn't allow distribution of a modified version of the program.

    You can read this in the gnuplot FAQ

  4. Re:Looks not so great by DustMagnet · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's the primitive part I like about gnuplot. It's great for quick and dirty data verification plots. When I want really pretty plots for publications, I use GMT. It take forever to fine tune a GMT plot, but you can make them exactly how you want. It's also very scriptable(TM) which one of my requirements.

    --
    'SBEMAIL!' is better than a goat!!
  5. Great Tool by jefu · · Score: 2, Informative
    I find gnuplot a very handy tool. It is excellent for just grabbing a bunch of data and putting up quick plots - not always the fanciest looking plots, but its fast, copes with largish (say a million points) nicely and produces acceptable (if not fancy) output that can be included elsewhere.

    For fancier stuff there are fancier tools (including opendx ), but for simple stuff gnuplot works well, is reasonably priced and is hard to beat.

  6. New LaTeX support by P-Nuts · · Score: 2, Interesting

    For me, the best feature of gnuplot was the pslatex terminal, which allows you to let LaTeX take care of typesetting the labels, legends and so forth, making the graph you include look much more integrated into your document than including just a plain .eps exported from some other software. Apparently there is now also an epslatex terminal, and I would be interested to find out what benefits using this instead has.

    On a side note, xfig allows the creation of simple diagrams with LaTeX formatted captions. Together, these programs take care of making the prettiest figures in your document, though I'd like to know about any other software that produces split PostScript/LaTeX files.

  7. What use is SVG by jabuzz · · Score: 2, Insightful

    When virtually nothing can import it apart from a few SVG drawing packages? The day I can import a random SVG into OpenOffice etc. then it will be useful.