[OS X TeX] GNUPLOT on Mac

[Aaron Jackson]

Aquaterm is a small app that other programs can use to display  
graphical output.  Gnuplot does not require Aquaterm, however  
installing it is highly recommended.  Gnuplot has to display plots  
somehow, so it uses Aquaterm if it is available, if not it can use  
X11.  If you never want to see the plots (within gnuplot itself),  
then gnuplot can save them directly to disk as LaTeX, pdf, eps,  
png,... files, which means, in this case, that X11 and Aquaterm are  
not needed.

Gnuplot is very easy to compile.  A simple

./configure
make
make check
make install

should do the trick (assuming that you have Aquaterm installed,  
otherwise skip the make check step).  If the configure stops for any  
reason (perhaps a missing readline lib if I remember), you can  
disable the check that is failing (type ./configure --help for  
options).  You wont need it anyway if you are not directly using  
gnuplot.


On May 23, 2007, at 2:35 PM, Joshua Smith wrote:

> Hello all:
>
> I am beginning to explore the use of pgf/TikZ to put figures into  
> my TeX documents (using TeXShop as the front-end).  To plot  
> functions, it appears that GNUPLOT needs to be installed.  I did a  
> little Google searching and one website stated that GNUPlot  
> requires AquaTerm (which I have no idea what that is).  Can anyone  
> give a recommendation for the best/simplest way to install and  
> configure GNUPLOT if the only thing I want to do with it is use it  
> with pgf/TikZ?  Just download it from SourceForge and compile?  Do  
> I need to make sure it is installed anyplace specific for pgf/TikZ  
> to see it, or does the compilation take care of that?
>
> Thanks,
> Josh
>
>
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