Plotting with Gnuplot

As an alternative to Plplot, BSU programs can be compiled to pipe the graphics through the Gnuplot program (installed with your package manager). For compiled BSU using the -enable-all-static option, Gnuplot is the default for all BSU plotting programs.

IMPORTANT: After Gnuplot 4 a bug appeared so that only the positive numbers are plotted with Gnuplot 5 on a system. The fix is to compile BUS with the -with-gnuplot5 option. Specifying this option will work for both Gnuplot 4 and 5 installations, but the *.gp files generated will be twice as large.

In any case, if BSU has been compiled with the Plplot configuration option, -with-plplotlib, there are still a few programs that only use the Gnuplot facility. These programs are:

• qplt - Quick plot for a profile. The command line options are:
  filename   tmin   tmax
  See figure 6 for an example.
• tplt - Single trace plot. The command line options are:
  filename   trace    tmin    tmax
  See figure 7 for an example.

Figure 6: Plot of surface wave data using qplt. The qgraph.gp output file was edited to make a Postscript figure, and that is shown here.

Figure 7: First trace of figure 6 surface wave data using tplt.