Gnuplot Central

The new, official web site for gnuplot is now at www.gnuplot.info. Over time, the page at UCC will become a mirror of the official site, but for now, it's just the other way round.

The News

Gnuplot 3.7.3 was released on Friday, 20th of December 2002. Check out the official announcement. The distribution sites are:

In North America

ftp://ftp.gnuplot.info/pub/gnuplot/
The file area of the gnuplot development project web site at SourceForge.

In Australia:

The AARNET Mirror project at http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/gnuplot/ and ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/gnuplot/. This site is not accessible outside Australia/New Zealand.
ftp.cc.monash.edu.au/pub/gnuplot

In Europe:

Mirrors:

In Germany: ftp://linux.mathematik.tu-darmstadt.de/pub/linux/mirrors/misc/gnuplot/
Gnuplot is now mirrored on CTAN in the tex-archive/graphics/gnuplot directory.

Other:

Source and binary distributions for the Amiga will be available on Aminet. Here is a complete list of Aminet mirrors.
NEW! An updated gnuplot port for the Macintosh is now available at http://homepage.mac.com/gnuplot/.

Binary versions for various non-Unix platforms will be made available in the same places. Please allow a couple of days for these distributions to appear.

All distribution archives are signed with a public key which is available from public key servers. For more information, see the README and PGPKEYS file at the distribution sites.

The FAQ

An updated version of the gnuplot FAQ is now available. It can be found at the following locations:

http://www.gnuplot.info/faq/
http://www-ihe.etec.uni-karlsruhe.de/mitarbeiter/vonhagen/gnuplot-faq.html
ftp://ftp.gnuplot.info/pub/gnuplot/faq/faq.txt
All main distribution sites in the faq/ subdirectory.

The LZW Patent

Gnuplot requires the gd graphics library to create gif output. Note that the use of this code may subject your organisation to a charge of willful patent infringement (as stated by Unisys - check the details here.) unless you are in possession of a Unisys license.

The Unisys patent covers the LZW technology, which is used to create gif, tiff-lzw, pdf-lzw and other image formats. To our knowledge, only gd library version 1.3 and 1.4 are free of LZW code and should therefore be used with gnuplot (unless you have a license, in which case version 1.2 and 1.5 is fine, too). The binaries provided by the gnuplot team have been built with version 1.3. Version 1.6+ cannot be used because support for GIF has been removed altogether, see http://www.boutell.com/gd/.

As all gif-creating versions of gd library seem to have been taken off www.boutell.com, we are providing gd library versions 1.3 and 1.4 at the gnuplot distribution sites (see above). Should any legal problems arise, we will remove this software.

We strongly recommend to use png images instead of gif. The required libraries can be downloaded from http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngcode.html and http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/zlib/. They are also available from the gnuplot distribution sites.

The Links

This is a completely unorganised list of gnuplot related web and ftp sites. Email me if you know any other useful links.

Probably the most comprehensive gnuplot links page out there: Bernhard Reiter: Gnuplot - Scientific Plotting
The old gnuplot pages at Dartmouth have been removed, and all links are being redirected to this page.
The newer pages at http://members.theglobe.com/gnuplot/ and http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Foothills/6647/
Alex Woo's gnuplot demo plots
A new, reader-maintained on-line resource for discussing and learning about gnuplot at http://gnuplot.sciwikis.org/
An online copy of the gnuplot 3.7 manual
The manual for gnuplot 3.7.1.
An Introduction to GnuPlot at the University of Northern Iowa
A brief gnuplot tutorial by Henri Gavin
A vastly improved gnuplot-mode.el for Emacs or XEmacs
Xgfe, an X11 based front end to gnuplot. Although this is the official page, it is not quite up to date. Newer versions of xgfe are put in the contrib directory at gnuplot distribution sites as we find them.
An older Tcl/Tk interface for gnuplot
A Bourne shell based gnuplot frontend by Michael Sternberg
gnuplot interfaces in ANSI C by Nicolas Devillard
Another C interface to gnuplot by Ed Breen
A Python packages that interfaces to gnuplot: Gnuplot.py
An collection of ANSI Common Lisp by Sam Steingold, which includes an interface for gnuplot. See here for details.
The Qplot package to plot quarterly time data
A graphical interface to gnuplot, based on tcl/tk, at http://sourceforge.net/projects/unicalculus/
A simple Visual Basic interface to gnuplot at http://vbgnuplot.freeservers.com/
A perl script to create filled boxes with the postscript terminal, by Andreas Widmann. The script draws boxed keys, and fills (and outlines) boxes by post-processing gnuplot postscript output. This is new in comparison to the patches of Steve Cumming and Bernhard Reiter since it works for postscript output (Steve Cummings patch only works well only on non-vector oriented terminals) and you don't have to go through fig which implies some heavy restrictions
Precompiled gnuplot packages for Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX and Digital Unix can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.thewrittenword.com/free/by-package/
Precompiled gnuplot packages for Solaris only can be found at http://www.sunfreeware.com/

Software that uses gnuplot:

Octave, a high-level language for numerical computations. Mostly compatible with Matlab.
Maxima, a program for symbolic computation.
SoftIntegration have developed a C interpreter that uses gnuplot for its high-level 2D/3D plotting functions. See the documentation. Note: this is commercial software.
Mifit, a program to generate assembler code needed to approximate a data set using simple functions.

Gnuplot pages in French:

Gnuplot pages in Japanese:

An fltk (?) based graphical frontened at http://www2.osk.3web.ne.jp/~heuy/html10/
Another tcl based frontend http://mibai.tec.u-ryukyu.ac.jp/~oshiro/Programs/tcltk/tkgproll and documentation for gnuplot http://mibai.tec.u-ryukyu.ac.jp/~oshiro/Doc/gnuplot_primer/. Maintained by OSHIRO Naoki.
Example pm3d pictures and scripts at http://ayapin.film.s.dendai.ac.jp/~matuda/Gnuplot/pm3d.html
A site for not so frequently asked questions. Also available in English, but the translation is not complete yet.

Gnuplot pages in Indonesian:

Gnuplot tips
A book about gnuplot

Gnuplot pages in Portuguese:

A Gnuplot FAQ for Brazilian users.

The Source

In January 2000, gnuplot development moved to SourceForge. While not all the features SourceForge provides are fully utilised yet, we make heavy use of the Concurrent Versions System (CVS) to allow parallel development, and full access to the source for everyone interested.

The gnuplot project info page is here, and if you're interested in (read-only) access to the latest source code, follow the instructions here.

There are currently two branches in the CVS repository. The main branch, which since the "Helloween Frenzy" a few weeks ago includes Petr Mikulik's new PM3D code, and also a complete rewrite of all axis related code by HBB, is directly accessable following the instructions at http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=2055. Then there's the pre-3-7-1 branch (the name is historical) which contains all the code and bug fixes for the gnuplot 3.7.x line. To access this branch, follow the cvs instructions and add "-rbranch-pre-3-7-1" after co.

The Team

A very incomplete list of contributors can be found in the manual.

The gnuplot team would like to thank all who have contributed discussion, suggestions, bug reports, and patches to improve gnuplot. Special thanks go to Alex Woo for setting up and maintaining the gnuplot web sites. To Dick Crawford for his untiring and competent presence on comp.graphics.apps.gnuplot. To Juergen von Hagen for adopting the orphaned FAQ list. To John Turner for buying gnuplot.org and letting us use it. To Hans-Bernhard Broeker for neverending supply of bug fixes. And, last but not least, to Thomas Williams and Colin Kelley for creating this great software in the first place.

The Rest

Best viewed with any browser.