Development of gnuplot plotting package for MAD-X

MAD-X is a general purpose software for charged-particle optics design and it needs a visualisation tool to be able to show the data in a more manageable way, this visualisation tools being already in MAD-X are the PLOT and SETPLOT commands. Nonetheless issues like compatibility and the desire of having alternative ways to show the plots in a more portable way have lead to explore the use of open source available software to reproduce the same results. The purpose of this project is to create a package compatible with the MAD-X output format, capable of generating publication quality plots, mainly lattice beamline plots and scatter plots by using the Gnuplot for creating plots. This software must support the same options as the PLOT and SETPLOT commands from MAD-X but additions or improvement over the present version are more than welcome. The main purpose of the program is to pre-process the data in order to be ready for Gnuplot to read it and plot it .This report is mostly a description of the development of the software as well as a basic introduction on how to use it, finally examples of the created plots are shown.