Re: [Gnuplot-info] Histograms with dates on the X axis

[Steve C. <sc...@ja...>]

CLOSE Dave wrote:
> Steve Cohen wrote:
> 
>> Having recently swum in these same shark-infested waters myself (I am
>> not a developer of this project, just a user like you) I would first
>> get rid of
>> set xdata time
>> set timefmt "%Y-%m"
>> set format x "%m\\n%Y"
>>
>> Histograms and these time functions simply don't mix.  At all.
> 
> Thank you to both Steve and Hans-Bernhard for that. I wonder if this
> would merit mention in the manual?
> 
>> You will, of course, then, not see labels on your x-axis, but you
>> should at least see a graph.
>>
>> Now, for those x-axis labels, Gnuplot's string functions are your
>> friend:
>>
>> plot "/tmp/file" using
>> 2:xtic(substr(stringcolumn(1),6,7)\\nsubstr(stringcolumn(1),1,4),
>> "/tmp/file" using ($3+$4+$5+$6+$7)
>> axis x1y2
> 
> Thank you, Steve. I was in the process of researching how to get the
> labels I need when your note dramatically shortened my effort. But I did
> need to change your suggestion slightly.
> 
> 1. Your parentheses weren't balanced (easy to fix).
> 2. \\n doesn't work in that place. I had to change it to '."\n".'. That
> is, put it in quotes and use string concatenation. I could also have
> used sprintf but that takes more characters to type.
> 3. I had to add "bmargin 3" so the second line of label would actually
> appear.
> 
> 	Dave Close
> 
> 
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> 
Heh, I'm a relative newbie myself and I thought my concatenation was
weak, but I didn't see an explicit concat() function, but I decided to
send it anyway and so you've gone me one better and taught me something.
 In my similar example I was able to take a substring of the date as a
whole without needing to concatenate the pieces.  If your source is a
database query you might consider rewriting it if you can to avoid such
ugliness.

another trick for the x labels is

set xtics nomirror out rotate by -45

which outputs the labels diagonally so you can squeeze more in.  Don't
know if that would work for you.

Steve