This recipe shows you how to make the simplest step-type histogram. Later, we will build histogram and statistical plots on this, but sometimes this is all you need. The following figure shows a simple step-type histogram:
We're going to plot a part of our file parabola.text, so make sure that's still available. Of course, if you have your own sorted statistical data that will probably be more interesting.
Type the following command to make a histogram plot:
plot [-2:2] 'parabola.text' with histeps
As we can see, rather than drawing a line through a series of x-y points, the histeps style draws a staircase composed of horizontal and vertical line segments. The vertical lines are drawn not at the actual x-coordinates given in the data, but at the average values of neighboring x-coordinates. This is the usual way to construct a histogram, where each box represents "how much" is contained in each interval between two x-values.