>> It's nice that you can load it up and say "plot exp(-x**2)" and it
>> immediately plots something. (The alternative being to open Excel
>
> Well, right tool for the right job...

It also can do certain types of plot that Excel can't do at all. On the 
other hand, with Excel, if I want to change the font size of the X-axis 
labels, I just right-click it and press "format". Good luck finding out 
how to do that in GNUplot (or even *if* you can do that in GNUplot - it 
varies by OS and output target!)

> Nah - the build in help covers everything, but I give you that some stuff
> is really hard to find.

Really *really* hard to find, yes.

>> On top of that, while the expression language is great for plotting
>> explicit functions, it's useless for plotting anything else. Even
>> something as trivial as a recurrence relation is beyond its power.
>
> I don't know what exactly you want to do, but googling for "recurrence
> relation gnuplot" came up with this nice mandelbrot fractal:
>
> http://t16web.lanl.gov/Kawano/gnuplot/fractal/mandelbrot-e.html

I have literally no idea how that's possible.

> That's already a quite old version of povray

Uh... POV-Ray?

> But I guess the stuff gnuplot is really good at is plotting data

Yes, that's really its design purpose.

Of course, the fact that this data was to be in THE EXACT RIGHT FORMAT 
or it refuses to plot anything isn't very helpful.

>> Now, if only it would support CSV input... You know, the de facto file
>> format for all numerical data? Yeah. :-P
>
> I think it does? See
>
> http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/docs_4.2/node173.html

All these years I've been using GNUplot and I've never once been able to 
make it plot any data from an external source. (That should tell you how 
good the documentation is...)

OK, so that's how you tell it to load CSV. Now how do you specify which 
columns to plot?

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