gnuplot documentation

5 BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY gnuplot 4.3 19
4.8.5 ai
The Adobe Illustrator ai driver is outdated. Since Adobe Illustrator understands PostScript files, set
terminal post level1 ... should be used instead.
4.8.6 epslatex, pslatex, pstex
The terminals supporting an output to latex augmented by PostScript commands have been consolidated.
Many options are the same as in the postscript terminal.
4.8.7 windows
The windows terminal now supports enhanced text mode.
4.9 Canvas size
In earlier versions of gnuplot, some terminal types used the values from set size to control also the size
of the output canvas; others did not. The use of ’set size’ for this purpose was deprecated in version 4.2.
In version 4.3 almost all terminals now behave as follows:
set term size , controls the size of the output file, or "canvas".
Please see individual terminal documentation for allowed values of the size parameters. By default, the
plot will fill this canvas.
set size , scales the plot itself relative to the size of the canvas. Scale values less than
1 will cause the plot to not fill the entire canvas. Scale values larger than 1 will cause only a portion of
the plot to fit on the canvas. Please be aware that setting scale values larger than 1 may cause problems
on some terminal types.
The major exception to this convention is the PostScript driver, which by default continues to act as it
has in earlier versions. Be warned that the next version of gnuplot may change the default behaviour of
the PostScript driver as well.
Example:
set size 0.5, 0.5
set term png size 600, 400
set output "figure.png"
plot "data" using lines
These commands will produce an output file "figure.png" that is 600 pixels wide and 400 pixels tall.
The plot will fill the lower left quarter of this canvas. This is consistent with the way multiplot mode
has always worked, however it is a change in the way the png driver worked for single plots in version
4.0.
5 Backwards compatibility
Gnuplot version 4.0 deprecated certain syntax used in earlier versions, but continued to recognize it.
This is now under the control of a configuration option, and can be disabled as follows:
./configure --disable-backwards-compatibility
Notice: Deprecated syntax items may be disabled permanently in some future version of gnuplot.
One major difference is the introduction of keywords to disambiguate complex commands, particularly
commands containing string variables. A notable issue was the use of bare numbers to specify offsets,
line and point types. Illustrative examples:
Deprecated: