Glossary

As gnuplot has evolved over more than 30 years, the meaning of certain words used in commands and in the documentation may have diverged from current common usage. This section explains how some of these terms are used in gnuplot.

The term "terminal" refers to an output mode, not to the thing you are typing on. For example, the command set terminal pdf means that subsequent plotting commands will produce pdf ouput. Usually you would want to accompany this with a set output "filename" command to control where the pdf output is written.

A "page" or "screen" or "canvas" is the entire area addressable by gnuplot. On a desktop it is a full window; on a plotter, it is a single sheet of paper.

When discussing data files, the term "record" denotes a single line of text in the file, that is, the characters between newline or end-of-record characters. A "point" is the datum extracted from a single record. A "block" of data is a set of consecutive records delimited by blank lines. A line, when referred to in the context of a data file, is a subset of a block. Note that the term "data block" may also be used to refer to a named block of inline data (see datablocks).