## Thursday, December 6, 2007

### gnuplot-compatibility backend

I used to work a lot with gnuplot. For what matter, I still do. I find it very convenient to write simple models (the one you can solve analytically), especially with the help of gnuplot-mode, a mode for editing gnuplot files and interacting directly with gnuplot, rather more smoothly than the standard gnuplot interface. But, you might have guessed, I don't like how gnuplot's output looks. After all, that's why I did write ctioga!

So what ? I won't use ctioga for playing with my models, as it has not been designed with interactivity in mind, and will most probably never be (that would somehow defeat it's purpose). But I don't want to do the same work twice, especially if the second time is way more tedious than the first...

So I wrote a new backend, gnuplot, whose job is to feed a file to gnuplot and tweak it so that ctioga gets the data of all the plots. Imagine you have a file biniou.gnu in the spirit of

a(x) = x**2 + 2*x + 1
plot a(x), x**2 - x


Then, you can plot both a(x) and x**2 - x with the following command-line:

ctioga --gnuplot biniou.gnu@1##2


Note that it only takes data ! Style is completely dismissed.

#### 1 comment:

Anonymous said...

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If you want to learn more about the book and the author, check out my book page at Principal Value - Gnuplot in Action.