Gnuplot: Ugly Figures

Gnuplot is a portable command-line driven graphing utility for many platforms. In the basic way, it does render figures in a pixelized and not nice way. This is how to deal with it…

Native Bitmap Way

To export bitmap figures, the following can be used:

set term png

However, the libgd does not support antialiasing. Therefore, pngcairo needs to be used instead:

set term pngcairo

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Vector Workaround

The bitmap can be produced externally, by the ImageMagick program for instance. First, the figure is exported to a vector format (SVG, PDF, etc.) and consequently, converted using the convert program into a bitmap (PNG, JPG, etc.)

$ convert FIGURE.ps FIGURE.png