Introduction and History

GNUPLOT was originally developed by Colin Kelley and Thomas Williams in 1986 to plot functions and data files on a variety of terminals. In 1988 and 1989 I created an alternate version, known as GnuTEX, that supported a new ``terminal type'' called latex, so gnuplot would output L^ATEX code. The plot could then be included in a L^ATEX document. I added a number of embellishments, supported only by the latex terminal, allowing the user to produce publication-quality plots.

In late 1989 and early 1990 GnuTEX and a number of other GNUPLOT variants were merged together into a new release of GNUPLOT, 2.0. This includes, among many other improvements, a L^ATEX driver derived from the one in GnuTEX. Former GnuTEX users are referred to Section  for information about adapting to GNUPLOT. Anyone interested in using GNUPLOT with L^ATEX should read the next section, a tutorial, and the primary GNUPLOT manual.

The reader should note that the L^ATEX picture environments output by GNUPLOT can be quite large and complicated, and can easily exceed the memory capacity of TEX. If an enlarged version of TEX is available, it is wise to use it. Otherwise, keep your plots simple and add \clearpage to your document where necessary.

There is also a new EEPIC driver (eepic), intended for use with the EEPIC macro package for L^ATEX. EEPIC allows for much more efficient line-drawing, runs through L^ATEX faster, and uses less memory. See Section  for more information.

There is a small package of auxiliary files (makefiles and scripts) that I find useful for making L^ATEX plots with GNUPLOT. This is available for ftp as pub/gnuplot-latex.shar from cs.duke.edu. I can mail copies (see the end of this paper for information).