Plplot is relatively small, portable, freely distributable, and is rich enough to satisfy most users. it has a wide range of plot types including line (linear, log), contour, 3d, fill, and almost 1000 characters (including greek and mathematical) in its extended font set. the package is designed to make it easy to quickly get graphical output; only a handful of function calls is typically required. for more advanced use, virtually all aspects of plotting are configurable.

this package provides the gd driver module for plplot. it allows the generation of png and jpeg files directly from plplot programs. the gd driver is no longer actively maintained upstream and is likely to be dropped in a future release. the cairo and qt drivers offer newer, and better alternatives.