Speeding Up gnuplot Interface with Binary Data

[Ben Abbott]

On Oct 7, 2008, at 2:56 AM, Daniel J Sebald wrote:

> John,
>
> Attached is a patch using gnuplot's binary data input feature rather  
> than ASCII data fifteen characters wide.  It does appear to speed up  
> drawing a fair amount.  Less data is transmitted through the pipe,  
> gnuplot doesn't have to input data as formated, and as I see it  
> there is no need for handling NaN in a special way (it is just  
> another value in IEEE format).
>
> Let me know what you think.
>
> Dan

Dan, great idea.

Is it possible to optionally produce the ascii so that it may be saved  
to a file for examination?

For example, the syntax below was used to save the gnuplot stream and  
examined to determine why color interpolation was not working properly.

	[... plot commands ...]
	drawnow ("x11", "/dev/null", false, "debug.gp")

The plot can then be produced from a shell by

	gnuplot --persist debug.gp

Ben