Auto-Gnuplot

This project is aimed at helping generate Makefile for multiple Gnuplot scripts. All the script with names ended with .gnu in src directory are regarded as scripts to run. Their output will all be redirected to the output directory.

Already known BUG

This project is known to be suitable only for .gnu files that use LF ('\n') as the line ending and CANNOT handle .gnu files that use CRLF ('\r\n') as the line ending. Therefore, it is best suited for plotting in Linux distributions. It may be fixed in the future.

Requirements

This script MUST be run with /bin/bash, which is available in most popular Linux distributions nowadays.

However, you don't mean to switch current shell to that. The first line of all scripts here prompts the terminal to use the correct Bash shell.

If not, make it manually by

$ bash gen-Makefile.sh

The tool gnuplot must be installed in PATH. So it is with pdfcrop if figures are wished to be drawn in PDF format, which is useful for academic writings.

Usage

First, git clone this repository, and cd in. (Hint: The directory name auto-gnuplot can be renamed to whatever you want.)

$ git clone https://github.com/shao-xy/auto-gnuplot.git
$ cd auto-gnuplot

Then, put your Gnuplot scripts into the src directory in any way, with or without tree hierarchy.

Next step is the most important. Hint lines have to be added to EVERY script inside src directory.

In the beginning of each file, write a few lines as below:

# input: file1
# input: file2
# output: file3

These lines are omitted by Gnuplot, but visible to gen-Makefile.sh. The latter Bash script reads these lines to generate the Makefile, which later helps automatically draw these figures if any data are modified.

If no hint lines are given, gen-Makefile.sh read lines from the script itself, and tries to find lines like set output xxx. This works with simple path strings, but is risky in case Gnuplot supports variables or other methods to create a path string.

There might be many input files in different hint lines, or none at all, but no more than one output is supported.

Explanation of input/output paths in hint lines

Both absolute and relative paths are supported. For relative paths, input and output lines behave differently.

In terms of output lines, relative paths always start from a similar same path in the output directory. The prefix src/ is replaced with output/, and figures are drawn starting in the same parent path. For example, the next line in src/foo/bar.gnu refers to output/foo/bar.png:

# output: bar.png

Since bar.png is a relative path, and its source file is foo/bar.gnu, this tool copies the hierarchy of foo/ under src/ to output/, and then draws bar.png there.

In terms of input lines, relative paths means the current directory of the Gnuplot script. For example, files in src directory is organized as below:

+ src/
- ---- + foo/
       - ---- * bar.gnu
       - ---- + data/
              - ---- * bar.txt

And the hint lines in src/foo/bar.gnu can be like this:

# input: data/bar.txt

Collaboration and PRs are always welcome here! Enjoy!