Chapter 10. Advanced plotting concepts
This chapter covers
This is the last chapter in which we’re going to talk about gnuplot’s graphing features. In the next two chapters, we’ll talk about different ways of exporting graphs to files and about scripting gnuplot for batch mode, before turning our attention to the things we can find out using graphs. But before we can leave gnuplot’s plotting commands behind, we still have to finish off some topics that we haven’t mentioned so far.
In the next section, I’ll introduce gnuplot’s multiplot feature, a way to combine different plots in a single graph. In the remainder of this chapter, we’ll look at ways of visualizing vector fields at other coordinate systems (besides the right-angled, Cartesian system we’ve been using exclusively so far), and at parametric representations. In the final section, I’m going to introduce gnuplot’s built-in curve-fitting capabilities.
Except for the first topic (on multiplot), the material in this chapter is rather specialized and involves more advanced math than the rest of this book. Make sure you catch the multiplot features, but feel free to skip the rest if it’s not relevant to you right now.
Using gnuplot’s multiplot feature, we can combine several plots into a single graph. This can be useful for a number of different purposes: