Re: various observations (added to list)

[Daniel J S. <dan...@ie...>]

Ethan Merritt wrote:

Updated patch.  (Now uses sprintf() for titles... very useful.)

> The plot itself is not explained (no key, no titles, no labels),
> and to the naive user (me) it looks like the two curves do not
> match.  Plot error?  Code error? 

In this version I used "steps" as opposed to "histeps" (after looking closely at "steps.dem").  This looks better.  I still don't fully grasp the "steps" paradigm, but these three steps examples in steps.dem appear to do a very similar thing, the x-alignment being the apparent difference.  Given that, one wishes for a better syntax like "lhist", "chist", "rhist".  Anyway...

The key strings are

"scaled bin frequency"
"Gaussian p.d.f."

The first string means the random data is binned and the frequency of occurance of the r.v. outcome landing in that bin is scaled in such a way that the histogram should converge to the normal probability distribution function with increasing number of samples used in the simulation.

Hey, I noticed something strange, if the line

, normal(x) with lines title "Gaussian p.d.f."

is instead just

, normal(x) title "Gaussian p.d.f."

the green line doesn't show up in the key.  Is that the way it is supposed to behave?

> 
> It doesn't help any that the x-axis tic labels do not
> line up with the actual tic marks.

That had to do with the "set format <>".  I set

set format "%8.5g"

in order to get adequate resolution in the data file generated using "table".  Having that format still set caused the tick mark text to be a wide string with the value to the far right (and the rest space characters).  This could be done better in gnuplot, but I'm not concerned about that right now.  I just set the format back to the default before plotting.

>  If I reset and replot at
> the end of the demo, they seem to sort themselves out, but
> something in the sequence of demo commands is breaking the
> axis labeling.

Please check if this behaves better.

Dan