gnuplot documentation

206 gnuplot 4.3
78 Gnuplot limitations
Floating point exceptions (floating point number too large/small, divide by zero, etc.) may occasionally
be generated by user defined functions. Some of the demos in particular may cause numbers to exceed
the floating point range. Whether the system ignores such exceptions (in which case gnuplot labels the
corresponding point as undefined) or aborts gnuplot depends on the compiler/runtime environment.
The gamma and bessel functions do not work for complex arguments.
If a command line contains a "load" command, then anything on the line after the "load "
is ignored.
Only one color palette at a time is active for any given x11 plot window. This means that multiplots
whose constituent plots use different palettes will not display correctly in x11.
Coordinates specified as "time" wrap at 24 hours, and have a precision limited to 1 second. This is in
particular a limitation in using time format to handle geographic coordinates.
Error bars are not handled properly in polar/spherical coordinate plot modes.
The ’nohidden3d’ option that is supposed to exempt individual plots from the global property ’set
hidden3d’ does not work for parametric curves.
79 Specific terminals
Some older models of HP plotters do not have a page eject command ’PG’. The current HPGL driver
uses this command in HPGL reset. This may need to be removed for these plotters. The current PCL5
driver uses HPGL/2 for text as well as graphics. This should be modified to use scalable PCL fonts.
80 External libraries
External library GD (used by PNG/JPEG/GIF drivers): Versions of libgd through 2.0.33 contain various
bugs in mapping the characters of Adobe’s Symbol font. Also it is possible to trigger a library segfault
if an anti-aliased line crosses an upper corner of the canvas.
External library PDFlib (used by PDF driver): Gnuplot can be linked against libpdf versions 4, 5, or
6. However, these versions differ in their handling of piped I/O. Therefore gnuplot scripts using piped
output to PDF may work only for some versions of PDFlib.
External library svgalib (used by linux and vgagl driver): Requires gnuplot to be suid root (bad!) and
has many bugs that are specific to the video card or graphics driver used in X11.
Internationalization (locale settings): Gnuplot uses the C runtime library routine setlocale() to control
locale-specific formatting of input and output number, times, and date strings. The locales available,
and the level of support for locale features such as "thousands’ grouping separator", depend on the
internationalization support provided by your individual machine.
Part VII
Index