Question

I’m having trouble getting a “time friendly” X-axis layout in Gnuplot.

I need to present some data referring to a period within one day; the time X data is represented in decimal form, e.g. X=20.75 meaning 20 hours and 45 mins, the range is generally [0 : 24], but normally a subset, such as [2.25 : 8.75].

The default Gnuplot x-axis layout will be something like the range [0 : 25] with major tics at 0,5,10,15,…, which is nice for normal decimal data, but I would like it to choose something more “time friendly” in the usual clock manner, I mean major ticks at hours 1,2,3 or 6 and minor ticks at 1,5,15 or 30 minutes, suitably chosen depending on the range.

Does anybody know how to do that?

Answer 1

How about this?

set xtics 1, 0.25

Unfortunately, according to the manual:

Minor tics can be used only with uniformly spaced major tics. Since major tics can be placed arbitrarily by set {x|x2|y|y2|z}tics, minor tics cannot be used if major tics are explicitly set.