Pointtype command for gnuplot

Question

I'm having trouble using the pointtype command on gnuplot. I've tried several ways such as:

set pt 5
set pointtype 5
plot " " w pt 5
plot " " w pointtype 5

And for some reason nothing seems to work. I tried using the "help" feature, and apparently my version of gnuplot doesn't have "pt" or "pointtype" as an option. Is this perhaps listed as some other feature. I know the points are there, when I plot multiple sets of data, the point type automatically changes, but I have no personal control over choosing the point type.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You first have to tell Gnuplot to use a style that uses points, e.g. with points or with linespoints. Try for example:

plot sin(x) with points

Output:

Now try:

plot sin(x) with points pointtype 5

Output:

You may also want to look at the output from the test command which shows you the capabilities of the current terminal. Here are the capabilities for my pngairo terminal: