Avoiding overlapping labels

We devote our first recipe in this chapter to demonstrating several ways to avoid a common problem with gnuplot. As mentioned in previous chapters, gnuplot does not really try to account for the horizontal space occupied by tic labels, simply placing them at the tic positions and printing them in the selected tic font, whether that is the default or the one specified by the user.

This works acceptably well most of the time, but can fail spectacularly if our labels are long or we've chosen a big font. In these cases, the tic labels on the x-axis are in danger of overlapping. This is a particularly common problem when gnuplot is used to generate graphs automatically, where the user has no opportunity to tune each graph by hand.

In this recipe, we'll explore two ways to deal with long x-axis labels that don't require the use of tiny fonts to squeeze them in. The following figure shows the use of some very long numerical labels that are rotated to get them to fit, in...