Gnuplot tricks blog

If you've done any kind of plotting on the Unix side, you probably would have heard of gnuplot. I've been using it for years on and off and all my learning has been to cadge off the demo scripts on the home page. Those are excellent of and by themselves. To complement that, I saw a post on the gnuplot newsgroup about a blog http://gnuplot-tricks.blogspot.com/ by Zoltán. As mentioned in the post, he also maintains the same examples at this site.

I must say, it is an excellent blog on using gnuplot and I confess, that it does make me want to learn gnuplot to the extent the blog author has done.

Go take a look for the fantastic quality of the graphs.

R support for Org-mode

org-mode has some decent support for plotting using gnuplot for some time now.  For those using R, it looks like there might be some support for that too, if the preliminary discussions are anything to go by.

Do note that at this stage, you need ESS to be also installed.

Plotting tables in Org mode

A new tutorial has been added to Org-tutorials site explaining how to plot your org table data using gnuplot.   Another reason not to step out of emacs.

pgfplots: Plotting in LaTeX

pgfplots looks like a promising package for getting plots into LaTeX. I should probably give it a spin. The manuals, in PDF, here and here are detailed and extensive. And the plots are lovely; beautiful. (There, I get all nerdy)

One reason that I'd like to learn this package is that the alternate approach is to use gnuplot to generate a jpeg and then include that into LaTeX file. That comes with a whole bunch of issues like fiddling with fonts to match the LaTeX font scheme one uses, scaling the jpeg image to fit page and colours.

Since pgfplots is another package with the TeX system, it should be technically be a case of simpler and smaller dependencies for plots. And it uses the same pgf package that is part of the larger beamer package developed by Till Tantau. If you're a MikTeX user, it is available as a download from the package manager.