Gnuplot Interview Question:

Can we animate graphs in Gnuplot?

Submitted by: Administrator

First have a look at animate.dem in the demo directory of gnuplot. Basically, animated graphs are a sequence of plots in a suitable format.

If your installation of gnuplot is linked with gd 2.0.29 or newer (see previous entry), the gif terminal can generate directly an animated GIF.

Otherwise, have a look at the tool whirlgif 3.04, available at http://www.danbbs.dk/ dino/whirlgif. It reads run-length encoded GIF files and packs them into a minimal animation. On the web-pages you will find a manual and an example.

You can also write a small script to get gnuplot to output a family of GIF files, then have it execute some animator such as gifsicle: http://www.lcdf.org/ eddietwo/gifsicle or gifmerge http://the-labs.com/GIFMerge.

mpeg_encode will encode a sequence of images into an mpeg format movie.
Submitted by: Administrator