Gnuplot terminal

Question

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.

Answer 1

1. For some nice vectorised graphics in ones latex I use gnuplot like this with cairolatex output

   set term cairolatex pdf
   set output "data.tex"
   plot 'data.csv' using 1:2 with lines,
   

   And then I use the output from gnuplot in my latex like this

   \begin{figure}
     \centering
     \input{data.tex}
     \caption{}
   \end{figure} 
   

2. For the non-vectorised version you can just change

   set term cairolatex pdf
   set output "data.tex"
   

   to

   set term png
   set output "data.png"
   

3. As for color schemes I just go with the defaults or black so I don`t really know