For our July “Staff Pick” Project of the Month, we chose gnuplot, a portable, multi-platform, command-line driven graphing utility.
Gnuplot is an open source scientific plotting package that has been around for over 30 years, and yet still remains one of the most reliable and popular open source portable command-line driven graphing utilities. It supports many different types of 2D and 3D plots, as well as many different types of output.
Originally created to allow scientists and students to visualize mathematical functions and data interactively, it now supports many other non-interactive uses such as web scripting, and as a plotting engine by third-party applications like Octave.
Here are what some users on SourceForge had to say about their experience with gnuplot:
[I have been] using gnuplot for ages for scientific reports. It’s excellent and the makers really understand the needs of plots in the scientific world. Really, really useful and it keeps getting better and better. No doubt about it. ~mortenmacfly
It really is portable and it does work on different platforms – the devs didn’t lie. There are some things to be upgraded but I truly believe it will be done. ~pacnorm
Gnuplot has previously been featured as a “Staff Pick” Project of the Month in September of 2015, and again in September 2017. With its active development, there’s no doubt gnuplot will continue to keep getting better in the future.
Learn more about gnuplot, visit their official website: gnuplot.sourceforge.net
[ Download gnuplot ]