gnuplot 4.4 on OSX

10. June 2010 by admin.

gnuplot is a great open cross platform data visualization application, that beats just about every other graphing application hands down specially with large volumes of data. I use gnuplot on a daily basis to analyze application and systems performance data on my linux and windows machines. I was hoping there would be an OSX binary ready for me to download and use (wishful thinking). In order to build gnuplot on OSX from source, you will need to do the following

1. Download and install developer tools (XCode) on the OSX machine.
2. Download the gnuplot 4.4 source code.
3. gnuplot on mac does not support PNG and PDF terminals by default. In order to enable these terminals, one must install the GTK X11 package available from research.att.com. Installing the GTK package will make cairo based terminals for PNG and PDF available in gnuplot 4.4 on OSX.
4.  miscdebris.net has step by step instuctions on how to build gnuplot from the resources downloaded from above. I am mirroring the instructions here for future reference.

—x from miscdebris.net x—

1. Download the GTK_2.18.5-X11.pkg package fromhttp://r.research.att.com/ and install it
2. Add to your .profile file in the home directory:

    

    

   1	export PATH=/Library/Frameworks/GTK+.framework/Resources/bin:$PATH

3. (Re)start Terminal.app and see if pkg-config cairo --libs works.

Then download Gnuplot 4.4.0, untar, configure and compile it:

1. Download Gnuplot 4.4.0 from Sourceforge.
2. tar xzf gnuplot-4.4.0.tar.gz
3. cd gnuplot-4.4.0
4. mkdir build && cd build
5. ../configure --with-readline=bsd --disable-wxwidgets. In the configure output you should find something like

     wxt terminal: no (requires C++, wxWidgets>2.6, cairo>0.9, pango>1.10)   cairo-based pdf and png terminals: yes

6. make
7. sudo make install

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