GNU Octave Wiki

GNU Octave is a high-level interpreted language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides capabilities for the numerical solution of linear and nonlinear problems, and for performing other numerical experiments. It also provides extensive graphics capabilities for data visualization and manipulation. Octave is normally used through its interactive command line interface, but it can also be used to write non-interactive programs. The Octave language is quite similar to Matlab so that most programs are easily portable.

This wiki is intended to supplement the Octave documentation. Before adding content, please check that it is not already part of, or belongs in, the Octave's documentation.

Octave FAQ

The FAQ is a list of frequently asked questions (FAQ) for Octave users and a good place to start.

Octave Conference 2012

Planning for OctConf 2012 is under way. Newbies, experienced users, aspiring developers, and experienced developers are all encouraged to attend.

Table of contents

Below is a temporary attempt to organize the "most wanted" pages of the Wiki. A list of all pages on the wiki can be seen here. To locate something specific, try the wiki's search box, or prepend site:http://www.octave.org/wiki/ to a google search.

Installation Instructions for Windows, MacOS X and GNU/Linux

• Octave for Windows
• Installing Win32 Distribution
• Octave for MacOS X
• Octave for GNU/Linux

Building Octave

• Build from source
• Mercurial (hg) cheat sheet
• Testing Source Code
• GNU/Linux binary packages
• Octave for MacOS (minimalistic)
• Create a MacOS X App Bundle Using MacPorts
• Building Octave to Use Large Arrays

Octave Forge

• Octave Forge and Installing Packages
• Creating Packages

Available Packages

• Dicom
• Geometry
• I/O
• Java
• Mechanics
• Robotics
• Sockets
• Video

Editors & Octave

• Gedit
• Emacs
• VIM
• Kate

Plotting tutorial

All or most of the information about plotting in Octave can be found in the manual and on the internet. This information can be too scattered over different resources for a new user to find his/her way into solving a plotting problem/need. This tutorial should be considered as the 'recipe text' by examples if you consider the manual as a 'recipe ingredients only'.

• Recap of the hierarchy of each plot element

First of all, Octave aims at being compatible with Matlab (TM) as much as possible, so the graphics part is very similar too to Matlab. In Octave the first choice to make is the graphics_toolkit(). Standard is the 'gnuplot' toolkit using the Gnuplot software package . The second choice is 'fltk' fltk. You might want to try to test both of them for your plotting aims to see which solves your problem.

• Changing text elements (label, title)
• More control over subplots

Miscellaneous

• Tips and tricks
• All Pages
• Publications using Octave

External Links

• Octave Homepage
• Octave Forge
• GNU Octave - Bug Tracker
• GNU Octave - Task Tracker
• GNU Octave - Patch Tracker
• GNU Octave - Mercurial Repositories
• Planet Octave (site summary for blogs from Octave's GSoC students)