Plots may be displayed in one of eight styles: lines, points, linespoints, impulses, dots, steps, errorbars, boxes, or boxerrorbars. The lines style connects adjacent points with lines. The points style displays a small symbol at each point. The linespoints style does both lines and points. The impulses style displays a vertical line from the x axis (or from the grid base for splot) to each point. The dots style plots a tiny dot at each point; this is useful for scatter plots with many points.
The errorbars style is only relevant to 2-d data file plotting. It is treated like points for splots and function plots. For data plots, errorbars is like points, except that a vertical error bar is also drawn: for each point (x,y), a line is drawn from (x,ylow) to (x,yhigh). A tic mark is placed at the ends of the error bar. The ylow and yhigh values are read from the data file's columns, as specified with the using option to plot. See plot errorbars for more information.
The boxes style is only relevant to 2-d plotting. It draws a box centred about the given x coordinate from the yaxis to the given y coordinate. The width of the box is obtained in one of three ways. If a data file has a fifth column, this will be used to set the width of the box. Otherwise, if a width has been set using the set boxwidth command, this will be used. Otherwise the width of each box will be calculated automatically so that it touches the adjacent boxes. Another style called boxerrorbars is also available and is only relevant to 2-d data file plotting. This style is a combination of the boxes and errorbars styles.
The steps style is only relevant to 2-d plotting. This style connects consecutive points with two line segments: the first from (x1,y1) to (x2,y1) and the second from (x2,y1) to (x2,y2).
Default styles are chosen with the set function style and set data style commands. See plot style for information about how to override the default plotting style for individual functions.
Syntax:
set function style <style>
set data style <style>
show function style
show data style
where <style> is lines, points, linespoints, impulses,
dots, steps, errorbars, boxes, or boxerrorbars.