Commenting slightly out of sequence... sorry.

I thought that, too, back when I believed that writing a custom set of CALCOMP-compatible C library functions that generated Encapsulated PostScript would be a piece of cake to write. (My head still hurts from that battle fought intermittently over the years.)

I found the Gnuplot documentation to be pretty well-written compared to a great many other Open Source packages' documentation. The examples that come with the package are great places to start. Find one that's close to what you want to generate and tweak as necessary using the manual as a guide.

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Thanks, but I think it's just not worth it. That kind of thing should have a point and click GUI. The time it takes to read and assimilate all of its syntax idiosyncrasy will be better spent on making my own app, which I can then customize to my heart's content. Learning a programming language is worthwhile because it's useful for countless things in a whole lifetime. Learning the syntax of a chart plotting is a waste of time for most people including me. For some very basic plotting I can just MS Excel or WPS Spreadsheets. For other tasks (e.g. correlations) I will just code it myself.