gnuplot documentation

170 gnuplot 4.3 77 TERMINAL
GIF images are created using libgd, with optional support for TrueType fonts via libfreetype.
GIF plots may be conveniently viewed by piping the output to the ’display’ program from the ImageMagick
package as follows:
set term gif
set output ’| display gif:-’
View the output from successive plot commands interactively by hitting in the display window.
To save a particular one to disk, left click in the display window and choose save.
Five basic fonts are supported directly by the gd library. These are tiny (5x8 pixels), small (6x12
pixels), medium, (7x13 Bold), large (8x16) or giant (9x15 pixels). These fonts cannot be scaled or
rotated (pure horizontal or vertical text only).
transparent instructs the driver to generate transparent GIFs. The first color will be the transparent
one. Default is notransparent.
enhanced enables the enhanced text processing features, (subscripts, superscripts and mixed fonts).
See enhanced (p. 186) for more information. The full enhanced mode syntax is supported by the
PNG/GIF driver itself, but some of these features are dependent on which version of the underlying
libgd library is present, and which fonts are available.
If your local gd library was built with support for TrueType and Adobe Type 1 fonts, they may be
selected using the ’font {}’ option. is either the full pathname to the font
file, or a font face name that is assumed to be the first part of a filename in one of the directories listed
in the GDFONTPATH environmental variable. That is, ’set term gif font "Face"’ will look for a font
file named either /Face.ttf or /Face.pfa. Both TrueType and Adobe
Type 1 fonts are fully scalable and may be rotated through any angle. If no font is specified, gnuplot
checks the environmental variable GNUPLOT DEFAULT GDFONT to see if there is a preferred default
font.
The animate option is available only if your local gd library supports the creation of animated gifs. The
default delay between display of successive images may be specified in units of 1/100 second (default
5). The actual delay may vary depending on the program used as a viewer. An animation sequence is
terminated by the next set output or set term command. The optimize option has two effects on
the animation.
1) A single color map is used for the entire animation. This requires that all colors used in any frame of
the animation are already defined in the first frame.
2) If possible, only the portions of a frame that differ from the previous frame are stored in the animation
file. This space saving may not be possible if the animation uses transparency.
Both of these optimizations are intended to produce a smaller output file, but the decrease in size is
probably only significant for long animations or very small frame sizes. The nooptimize option turns
off both of the effects just described. Each frame is stored in its entirety along with a private color
map. Note that it is possible to post-process a non-optimized animation using external utilities, and
this post-processing can yield a smaller file than gnuplot’s internal optimization mode. The default is
nooptimize.
The size is given in pixels — it defaults to 640x480. The number of pixels can be also modified
by scaling with the set size command. crop trims blank space from the edges of the completed plot,
resulting in a smaller final image size. Default is nocrop.
Each color must be of the form ’xrrggbb’, where x is the literal character ’x’ and ’rrggbb’ are the red,
green and blue components in hex. For example, ’x00ff00’ is green. The background color is set first,
then the border colors, then the X & Y axis colors, then the plotting colors. The maximum number of
colors that can be set is 256.
Examples:
set terminal gif medium size 640,480 \
xffffff x000000 x404040 \
xff0000 xffa500 x66cdaa xcdb5cd \
xadd8e6 x0000ff xdda0dd x9500d3
# defaults