Styling your curves

This recipe delves into more detail about the linetypes we've seen before and introduces the powerful concept of linestyles.

How to do it…

Following is the script that makes the previous figure:

set key top left
set style line 1 lt 3 lw 4 lc rgb '#990042'         
set style line 2 lt 7 lw 3 lc rgb '#31f120'         
set style line 3 lt 2 lw 3 lc rgb '#0044a5'         
set style line 4 lt 9 lw 4 lc rgb '#888888'         
plot [0:1] x**0.5 ls 1, x ls 2, x**2 ls 3, x**3 ls 4

How it works…

In this recipe, we have introduced userstyles. With the invocation set style line n you can define a set of properties that will be associated with the index n in subsequent plot commands. In order to call up these properties, simply append the phrase ls n, substituting the desired index for n, to the plot command. ls is an abbreviation for linestyle.

The advantages of linestyles are that they can be reused repeatedly, can save considerable typing or space in gnuplot scripts, and can help to...