This. If you want to make graphs for a scientific publication, use Gnuplot. Your other uppercase-f-Free options are Octave (who knows how it will turn out since they stopped using Gnuplot), some Python thing (SciPy, of which I know little), and doing it yourself by hand (learn PostScript or some other vector drawing language).

However, the linked node has a bunch of extraneous garbage. (Also, it doesn't even work, since it doesn't bother to flush the temporary file before using it.) All you really need is some version of: 

open DATAFILE, ">$whatever";
# write data to DATAFILE
close DATAFILE;
open PLOT, "| gnuplot";
print PLOT <<EOS;
...
p '$whatever' ... (gnuplot options) ...
...
EOS
close PLOT;

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In reply to Re^2: Intro to plotting with perl by educated_foo
in thread Intro to plotting with perl by ZWcarp

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