Poor man’s Jupyter notebook with gnuplot

How it works

Link the gnuplot source file in the markdown document. Make sure to put it in the ../plots directory.

![Some Math functions](../plots/some-math.svg 'bar')

make will call gnuplot and replaces the link with the generated .svg for the webpage. In vim press gf to edit the source file under the cursor.

First steps

Draw some math functions.

set title "Some math functions"
set xrange [-10:10]
set yrange [-5:5]
set zeroaxis
plot (x/4)**2, sin(x), 1/x

.gnuplot configuration

Make it look good. Edit ~/.gnuplot and set svg output, set font to sans-serif, set background color and color scheme.

load '~/viridis.pal'
set terminal svg size 400,300 dynamic
set samples 1000
set lmargin at screen 0.1
set rmargin at screen 0.9
set bmargin at screen 0.1
set tmargin at screen 0.85
set xlabel font 'sans-serif,16'
set ylabel font 'sans-serif,16'
set xtics font 'sans-serif,16'
set ytics font "sans-serif,16"
set title font 'sans-serif,16'

Font size

Text always scales with the svg (in svg ‘s’ is scalable, so it’s fine). I don’t like that, but svg works like a sandbox within the html document, it will still scale even if I set font-size with rem. Send me a note if you know how to fix this.

Read more

gnuplot examples