Today I face the problem of writing a big article and I need my plots to look very nice and neat. I've looked into gnuplot documentation and was horrified: there are many different terminals with tons of options. I always use epslatex
with only size
option terminal in gnuplot to include my plots to latex projects. But there are epscairo
, latexcairo
, latex
, pslatex
, tikz
and another different terminals. Which of them I should use? Which options I should use? Could you provide some recommendations how to get good-looking plots, please?
More accurate questions:
1) Which terminal and options I should use to get the most beautiful vector plot with latex text processing to input it in latex project later?
Please, provide the example like set terminal type [options]
if it possible
2) Which terminal and options I should use to get the most beautiful NON-vector plot with latex
text-processing? For example, if I want share my plot as just image.
3) Are there something like color schemes for plots? For example I have 10 sets of data with approximation to plot them on single figure. I would like to plot data with points, and an approximation with lines, so, I need 20 different colors which should look nice, and colors of point and line should combine. It's very hard to pick up colors empirically.
pgfplots
instead of gnuplot or together with gnuplot (gnuplot only to calculate the values).pgfplots
has some features thatgnuplot
doesn't have? Maybe something like color schemes which I've described in3
paragraph? Or another useful things? Because I am a bit of skeptic of learning new tool if it does not have good advantages.pgfplots
provides a lot of features, but you are the only one who can decide whether or not these are relevant for you. Starting from your question: You do not need to think about text processing, because text processing is always done using LaTeX. There are something like color schemes but AFAIK the default are not made for 20 different colors. You can add additional graphic elements using very powerful TikZ.