Things easy to do with ctioga, and not with gnuplot
This gallery demonstrates things which are either much easier with ctioga than with gnuplot, or even impossible to do with the latter.
Tangents
ctioga provides a very neat way for making tangents, as it is
automatically making them. Gnuplot does not compute them, which makes
it more delicate, especially for data files:
set title "Simple plot" set arrow from 0,1 to 2,0 plot [0:10] exp(-x/2)Gnuplot file size: 71 |
ctioga --xpdf -t 'Simple plot' \
--math --math-xrange 0:10 'exp(-x/2)' \
--draw 'tangent: 0.005 xextent=2 color=Black'
CTioga file size: 126 |
 |
 |
Sure, Gnuplot seems to cope reasonably well with that. However, for a
slightly more complex case, where manual computation of the tangent
gets painful, ctioga is the clear winner (the Gnuplot plot was not
made because it is way too painful).
ctioga --xpdf -t 'Elaborated tangents' -N \
--math 'x**3 - 2*x**2 + 5*x + 8' \
--draw 'tangent: 0 xextent=3 color=Black' \
--draw 'tangent: 0.25 yuntil=0 color=Black' \
--draw 'tangent: 0.5 xuntil=10 color=Black' \
--draw 'tangent: 0.75 xuntil=10 color=Black'
NB: this plot will work only with ctioga version 1.8 (currently
only available from the
SVN repository).
Color gradients
ctioga provides a very easy way to make color gradients across
several curves. This feature is simply absent from gnuplot, not to
mention that it is painful to actually choose colors precisely !
ctioga --xpdf -t 'Color gradients' -N \
--math --color-set gradient:Red--GrassGreen,10 \
'x**2 + 0##9 * x + 1'
What this example also shows is that ctioga provides a very compact
way to specify several curves at the same time.
