The previous chapters have all dealt with the creation of graphs, or of illustrations made up of sets of graphs, as isolated files or images on the screen. But in the real world, graphs and charts are often not content to stand on their own. The lucky ones become part of something larger. In this chapter, you will learn various techniques that will allow you to include your plots in technical documents, presentations, and web pages. The emphasis throughout will be on using the special capabilities of gnuplot, including some of its most recently added features, that allow it to work in close cooperation with document creation software for the production of the highest quality typeset or interactive documents.

The nature of what we shall be learning in this chapter means that there is an important difference between it and the previous ones. Up to now all you needed to follow the recipes in this book was a working installation of gnuplot and perhaps some auxiliary programs such as text editors and viewers for graphical files. But for some of the recipes in this chapter you will need to have installed some additional non-trivial software and have some knowledge of how to use it. This cannot be avoided, because we are concerned here with the creation of documents, and this is something that gnuplot does not do by itself. For the recipes where we show you how to create documents for the Web, however, all you will need besides a text editor is a modern graphical web browser.