Chapter 11. Terminals in depth

Gnuplot supports more than 70 terminals: devices for which it can produce output. This may seem daunting, but the reality is that most of them are obsolete today—the number of terminals that are relevant is (thankfully) much smaller.

We can divide the currently used terminals broadly into three groups: terminals that produce output in a standard graphics file format (bitmaps: GIF, JPG, PNG; scalable vector graphics: SVG), terminals that produce output primarily for print (PostScript and PDF), and terminals for interactive use.

Terminal handling used to be a bit messy, but a lot of effort has been made to streamline the user interface in recent releases (version 4.2 and higher). Today, most terminals follow similar conventions and share a common set of options.

In this chapter, I’ll first review the steps required to export plots to graphics file formats and make some additional suggestions on how this process can be improved (we touched on this briefly in chapter 2). I’ll then describe the most commonly found terminal features by themselves. In the sections dealing with individual terminals, we can then concentrate on features specific to each terminal.

11.1. Exporting graphs to file

11.2. Common terminal options

11.3. Standard graphics file formats

11.4. Print-quality output

11.5. Interactive terminals

11.6. Other terminals

11.7. Summary