plotting two histograms, one w/ and one w/o error bars in one plot

Question

I have the below script, which works fine when I have a third column in the second data set. Now I want to get the first histogram being drawn w/ error bars, and the second w/o. I can remove the :3 from the second plot command but gnuplot will complain about not enough data specified for the second histogram. If I remove set style histogram errorbars ... but that would disable the error bars on the first histogram, too. Is there a way to plot two histograms in the same figure, where one doesn't have error bars.

set xlabel ""
set ylabel ""
set boxwidth 0.9 absolute
set style fill solid 1.00 border -1
set style histogram errorbars gap 1
set style data histograms
set yrange [-1.746917959031165368e-01:3.668527713965446857e+00]
unset key
set datafile commentschar "#"
plot '-' using 2:3:xtic(1) title "onehist",\
'-' using 2:3:xtic(1) title "otherhist"
-3.583733737468719482e-01 1.073847990483045578e-02 1.073847990483045578e-02
-3.382162153720855713e-01 2.274234220385551453e-02 1.329828426241874695e-02
2.261839509010314941e-01 2.859487235546112061e-01 8.173441886901855469e-02
e
-1.164875924587249756e-01 4.266476333141326904e-01
-9.633044153451919556e-02 5.953223109245300293e-01
-7.617329061031341553e-02 6.151663661003112793e-01
-5.601614341139793396e-02 9.624376893043518066e-01
e

Answer 1

I'm not sure if it is possible to do this generally, but you can draw your histograms without the errorbars and then add them afterwards with an additional plot command.

plot '-' using 2:xtic(1) title 'onehist',\ 
'-' using ($0-0.2):2:3 with yerrorbars lc 'black' pt 0, \
'-' using 2:xtic(1) title 'otherhist',\ 

I'm not entirely sure how to determine the range of the actual bars, so the error bars are not perfectly centered, but this will place them on your graph as requested.

The additional command uses the yerrorbars style (which is how the histogram bars are drawn) to draw the error bars.

However, this isn't the best way to draw histograms. Gnuplot will treat the x-axis as a category with values 0, 1, 2, 3, etc. Therefore, even though you have different x values in both of your lists above, they will become superimposed over each other (and the second plot will change the x-axis values set by the first).

For your example, I would recommend using the boxes and boxerrorbars style.

set style fill solid
set boxwidth 0.01
plot '-' using 1:2:3 with boxerrorbars, '-' u 1:2 with boxes

or if you need the error bars to be a different color, draw them separately

plot '-' using 1:2 with boxes,\ 
'-' using 1:2:3 with yerrorbars lc 'black' pt 0,\
'-' u 1:2 with boxes