Overview

So, you have an amazing C++ application for which you need plotting capabilities. You have searched around and discovered that the available options for C++ plotting libraries is rather limited compared to other programming languages, such as Python, for example, which has matplotlib.

The goal of the sciplot project is to enable you, C++ programmer, to conveniently plot beautiful graphs as easy as in other high-level programming languages. sciplot is a header-only library that needs a C++14-capable compiler, but has no external dependencies for compiling. The only external runtime dependencies are gnuplot-palettes for providing color palettes and a gnuplot executable.

Here is an example of sciplot in action:

#include <sciplot/sciplot.hpp>
using namespace sciplot;

int main()
{
    // Create values for your x-axis
    const vec x = linspace(0.0, 5.0, 100);

    // Create a plot object
    plot plt;

    // Set its palette
    plt.palette("set2");

    // Draw a sine graph putting x on the x- and sin(x) on the y-axis
    plt.draw(x, std::sin(x)).title("sin(x)").linewidth(8);

    // Draw a cosine graph putting x on the x- and cos(x) on the y-axis
    plt.draw(x, std::cos(x)).title("cos(x)").linewidth(8);

    // Show the plot
    plt.show();

    // Save the plot to a PDF file
    plt.save("figure.pdf");
}

After compiling and executing this C++ application, the following figure should be produced:

Do you want to change the colors? Simple - just use the plot::palette method to set your preferred color palette. For example, plot::palette("parula") sets the parula color scheme. All available color palettes and their names can be found here. Many thanks to Anna Schneider for this incredible work of art!

For more examples, see the examples directory. If you need information about specific gnuplot functions, see the gnuplot documentation.

sciplot and gnuplot

All plotting capabilities of sciplot are powered by gnuplot. Your plotting code, using a modern and elegant C++ API provided by sciplot, is converted to a gnuplot script, which is then executed to generate the desired figure. Note that gnuplot 4.2+ is needed for multiplots.

rath3t/sciplot

Overview

sciplot and gnuplot