#1570 Uneven xtics when using timedata

[Antonio Ospite]

Hi,

if I use timedata for the x axis and set the xtics interval to something like 3 months I get some weird bumps in the xtics distribution: the tics are unevenly distributed.

I am attaching a test script.

The same unexpected behavior happens on either 4.6 or 5.1 from CVS (23 Feb 2015).

Thanks,
Antonio

[Ethan Merritt]

The program tries to round a total number of seconds to the nearest month boundary. This does not produce the result you probably want for at least two reasons:

(1) The tic series should start evenly on your start date.
Replace
set xtics three_months
with
set xtics strptime("%Y-%m-%d","2010-01-01"), three_months

(2) Your definition of three_months is not accurate and gradually accumulates rounding error. You would do better with
one_year = 60 * 60 * 24 * 365.25
three_months = one_year / 4

[Antonio Ospite]

These solutions help a lot, thanks Ethan.

I think the report can be closed.