CL-GNUPLOT : Plotting library for Common Lisp

Introduction and history

Originally written by Ryan Adams 2005-2007.

Updated and extended by Alexey Cherkaev, 2016.

CL-GNUPLOT provides structured interface to GNUPlot functionality. Instead of writing the queries to GNUPlot, the user creates and manipulates PLOT objects.

All the data is piped directly to GNUPlot without creating temporary files.

IMPORTANT: depends on SBCL

There are three non-standard functions that this package uses:

sb-ext:run-program

starts GNUPlot instance.

sb-ext:process-input

gets input stream from GNUPlot process

sb-ext:process-close

stops GNUPlot instance.

It is possible to extend it to support other CL implementation as far as they provide analogous functions.

Example

This example should help to start with the package

(let ((series (make-series-2d
               (loop for x from 0 upto 360 by 10
                  for y = (/ (* x pi) 180)
                  collect (list y (sin y)))))
      (plot (make-plot)))
  (plot-title plot "Sine plot")
  ;; change terminal, otherwise use default
  (plot-cmd plot "set terminal png")
  (plot-cmd plot "set output 'sin.png'")
  (plot-add-series plot series
                   :style "lines"
                   :title "y=sin(x)")
  (plot-xlabel plot "X")
  (plot-ylabel plot "Y")
  (plot-draw plot)
  ;; very important: close the plot in the end!
  (plot-close plot))

Result is shown below

Plans for the future

• Provide more structured commands, i.e. plot-terminal, plot-output, etc.
• with-plot macro
• Support for other ANSI Common Lisp implementations: CCL, CLISP, ABCL, CMUCL, CLASP.

License

GPL2