Gnuplot clustered histograms borders

Question

I have a clustered histogram which looks like this:

What I would like is some kind of border (like xgrid but between clusters, not at cluster middle).

How can I achieve this?

My histogram is build with this:

set encoding iso_8859_1
set terminal postscript enhanced color
set grid ytics
set style data histogram
set style histogram cluster gap 2
set style fill solid border rgb "black"
set auto x
set xtics rotate by -45
set xrange [0:10]
plot 'data.gnu' using 2:xtic(1), \
        '' using 3:xtic(1), \
        '' using 4:xtic(1), \
        '' using 5:xtic(1), \
        '' using 6:xtic(1)

theozh theozh · Accepted Answer · 2019-11-28T11:53:21

My hope was that you could do something with mxtics, but I had no success. So then, probably the easiest way is to manually draw the lines. Note that the xtic is not centered to the histogram if you have 5 bars (or odd number) per group. Shift your borders accordingly.

Code:

### (manual) borders between clustered histogram
reset session

$Data <<EOD
One   -1 -2 3 4 5
Two   -2 -3 4 5 6
Three -3 -4 5 6 7
Four  -4 -5 6 7 8
EOD

set grid ytics
set style data histogram
set style histogram cluster gap 2
set style fill solid border rgb "black"
set xtics rotate by -45
set xrange [-0.5:3.7]
set xtics
unset key

do for [i=1:3] {
    set arrow i from i-0.4, graph 0 to i-0.4, graph 1 nohead
}

plot $Data using 2:xtic(1), \
        '' using 3:xtic(1), \
        '' using 4:xtic(1), \
        '' using 5:xtic(1), \
        '' using 6:xtic(1)
### end of code

Result:

Gnuplot clustered histograms borders

1 Answers