FYI: g.gnuplot

[McCauley Technical Services]

I have been working with the maintainer of GNUPLOT to include
support for GRASS in the regular distribution of GNUPLOT. They
are currently in BETA testing too. (For those of you thinking
"hmm.. what is GNUPLOT?", see the excerpt from the README file
that is appended.)

A BETA version of GNUPLOT (3_3b9) that includes GRASS support
is available for anonymous ftp from 

  pasture.ecn.purdue.edu:pub/mccauley/grass/3_3b9.grass_mods.tar.Z. 

There have been some modifications since the last distribution
to g.gnuplot testers. A modification history is appended.

The current BETA version of GNUPLOT is 3_3b10, but this version has an
older version of the grass terminal (I didn't quite make the
deadline). When the maintainer of GNUPLOT has had sufficient time to
include GRASS support, I will make another announcement regarding
availability.

If there is sufficient interest, perhaps this could be included
in src.related. I have already received permission to do this, but
I'll leave this lobbying up to interested users.

Darrell
--
James Darrell McCauley                                   phone: 317.497.4757
McCauley Technical Services                      internet: darrellmy at ids.net
P.O. Box 2485                        West Lafayette, Indiana 47906-0485, USA

from 0README:
> Gnuplot is a command-line driven interactive function plotting utility
> for UNIX, MSDOS, and VMS platforms.  The software is copyrighted but
> freely distributed (i.e., you don't have to pay for it).  It was
> originally intended as graphical program which would allow scientists
> and students to visualize mathematical functions and data.  Gnuplot
> supports many different types of terminals, plotters, and printers
> (including many color devices, and pseudo-devices like LaTeX) and is
> easily extensible to include new devices.  [ The "GNU" in gnuplot is
> NOT related to the Free Software Foundation, the naming is just a
> coincidence (and a long story). Thus gnuplot is not covered by the Gnu
> copyleft, but rather by its own copyright statement, included in all
> source code files.]
> 
> Gnuplot handles both curves (2 dimensions) and surfaces (3
> dimensions). Surfaces can be plotted as a mesh fitting the specified
> function, floating in the 3-d coordinate space, or as a contour plot
> on the x-y plane. For 2-d plots, there are also many plot styles,
> including lines, points, lines with points, error bars, and impulses
> (crude bar graphs). Graphs may be labeled with arbitrary labels and
> arrows, axes labels, a title, date and time, and a key.  The interface
> includes command-line editing and history on most platforms.
> 
> The new gnuplot user should begin by reading the general information
> available by typing `help` after running gnuplot. Then read about the
> `plot` command (type `help plot`).  The manual for gnuplot (which is a
> nicely formatted version of the on-line help information) can be
> printed either with TeX, troff or nroff.  Look at the docs/Makefile
> for the appropriate option.

GRASS terminal Modification History:
 <15 Jun 1992> First version created with GNUPLOT 3.2
 <15 Feb 1993> Modified to work with frames
 <16 Feb 1993> Added point types triangle (filled and unfilled), 
               inverted-triangle (filled and unfilled), 
               circle (filled and unfilled), and filled box.
               Graph is no longer erased after g.gnuplot is finished.
 <01 Mar 1993> Modified to work with 3.3b9