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I am developing a C++ .exe that is ultimately intended to be completely standalone. The guts of my program currently uses Gnuplot for saving images of plots. I've taken a liking to Gnuplot very much, and would prefer to keep using it if able.

But, I've realized there might be a problem with distributing, given how Gnuplot is a .exe called by my C++ code and not an include-able header. This might(?) mean another user absolutely has to install Gnuplot on their own end if I don't want to just copy and plop Gnuplot into the distributed source folder. I'd rather avoid the latter for a lot of reasons.

Is there no way to avoid making a user install gnuplot in this case? I have considered implementing Qwt for this instead if this is too big of an issue.

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Yes, normally gnuplot would have to be installed on the target machine so that your program can send a command to it. It is a program, not a library.

However, strictly speaking that is not quite true. You could run gnuplot on a server machine somewhere to accept requests from your application running on a remote machine and return the requested plot. That puts the burden on you to provide a continuing service rather than simply providing an executable, but it would be possible.

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