If you have the tikz terminal available, you will most likely want to use it in situations such as those in the previous recipe, where you want to incorporate the results of the TeX typographical engine into your plots.
If tikz support happens not to be compiled into your version of gnuplot, you can achieve the same results using the older epslatex terminal. This is almost always available; you can check by typing set term and perusing the resulting long list of output devices that gnuplot knows about.
Using the tikz terminal for these purposes may lead to a simpler workflow, as it produces a TeX file that can be processed with pdflatex to produce a PDF file directly. This is what most people want to do most of the time, now that PDF has become the de facto standard for technical and scientific documents.
The epslatex terminal was designed for an earlier age when the only graphics format that could be included in LaTeX documents was encapsulated PostScript...
