Re: Sideways violin plots in one plot cmd?

[Juhász P. <pet...@gm...>]

On Sat, 2020-08-15 at 13:17 -0700, Ethan A Merritt wrote:
> On Friday, 14 August 2020 10:34:52 PDT Juhász Péter wrote:
> > On Wed, 2020-08-05 at 23:46 -0700, Dima Kogan wrote:
> > > A question. I'm looking at the violin plot demo page:
> > > 
> > >   http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/demo/violinplot.html
> > > 
> > > It shows how to make a horizontal density plot using 'smooth
> > > kdensity'.
> > > 
> > > Then it shows to to make a vertical density plot by plotting
> > > horizontally into a table, and then plotting the table, with
> > > "using"
> > > directives used to swap the axes. This works clearly, but is
> > > there a
> > > way
> > > to do this (vertical density plots) with a single plot command?
> > > That
> > > would make my life much easier.
> > > 
> > > Thanks!
> > > 
> > > 
> > > 
> > 
> > Well, recently at $work I used gnuplot to produce a sideways
> > histogram.
> > Because it had to be sideways, I had to resort to manually
> > assembling
> > the plot with the boxxyerror style, with an awkward preprocessing
> > step.
> > 
> > This, and your question, gives me the idea that it might be worth
> > adding a general 'transpose' option to some of the "clever" plot
> > styles
> > that produce non-trivial vertical plots (histograms and boxplots,
> > mostly).
> > 
> > best regards,
> > Peter Juhasz
> 
> "How to make a sideways plot" does seem to be a very
> frequently asked question.  There may be some clever way to select
> an x/y axis transposition in the general case, but if so I have not
> been
> able to find it.  
> 

I might have mislead the discussion with my suggestion, because as it
turns out, the only common thing it has with the original violin plot
question is "would there be a way to do X in a single command". Sorry
for the confusion.

That said, I don't think bringing in 3D (s)plot styles is a good
direction towards a general solution for sideways plots. To me, it
sounds like looking for our lost car keys in the corner only because
that's where there is light.

> The program was designed from the start to have a single 2D plot mode
> with x always horizontal, [...]

Yes, originally it was designed like that, but then more complex plot
styles like histograms and boxplots were added, which do non-trivial
preprocessing and aggregating steps before plotting the data. For
boxplots (and less acutely, even for histograms) the x axis of the plot
is no longer directly maps to any column of the original data.

> Peter - would the plot you constructed
> by hand be a good example to adapt?  If the combination
>     set view projection xz
>     splot ... with boxerror
> doesn't handle it adequately, that would highlight where it would
> be worth some additional work on the code. 

No, not really, unless I misunderstand you - my point was that I wanted
to produce (IIRC) a columnstacked histogram, and if it could have been
a vertical plot, I could have used `set style histogram columnstacked;
set style data histogram`, with all the nice intuitive data layout and
all the automatic box placement that style provides. But the
requirements called for a horizontal plot, so I had to do all that by
hand. Doing the same in 3D wouldn't have helped.

Peter

> 
> 	Ethan
> 
>