Making a ribbon chart in gnuplot

While I am not a vary big fan of this kind of chart, I admit that on occasion, it might lend a refreshing new look to a graph. Besides, we can use it for something else, but more on that later. So, we will set to make this graph

from a data file similar to this

0.857354 0.943516 0.546751 -0.588053 -0.548767
0.551386 0.896607 0.163013 -0.166411 -0.442178
0.243002 0.310189 0.465029 0.0790944 0.378762
-0.24 -0.0625021 0.226812 0.48102 0.451281
-0.422674 -0.444781 0.314025 0.626378 0.822247
-0.513352 -0.893642 0.220384 0.800136 1.1908
-0.660823 -0.513169 0.316238 1.08866 1.25814
-0.0962106 -0.130051 0.0965893 0.944557 1.01623
-0.0152513 -0.0945605 0.468029 0.240179 0.556154
0.489453 0.726084 0.398192 -0.162081 -0.167408
0.876023 0.997108 0.139124 -0.281058 -0.581462
0.945061 1.19238 0.359603 -0.706723 -0.687105
0.860648 0.907059 0.217838 -0.540168 -0.592025
0.901743 1.02898 0.242619 -0.337589 -0.584658

which we will call ribbon.dat. There is an easy way to make this graph, and this solution requires an external script. Tomorrow, I will show a solution, if a bit convoluted, entirely in gnuplot, so that even those of you, who do not fancy a gawk one-liner, can make a similar figure.

The basic idea is to take the columns of ribbon.dat one by one, and turn them into a surface plot, whose derivative in the x direction is zero, while it takes the successive values of the column along the y axis. The gawk one-liner that does this transformation for us is given here

#!/bin/bash
gawk -v c=$2 '{printf "0 %d %g\n1 %d %g\n\n", NR-1, $c, NR-1, $c}' $1

I.e, we take the column designated by the value of 'c', and instead of listing the members, we print out six times the length of the column numbers, of the form

0 0 0.857354
1 0 0.857354

0 1 0.551386
1 1 0.551386

0 2 0.243002
1 2 0.243002

0 3 -0.24
1 3 -0.24

0 4 -0.422674
1 4 -0.422674
...

(If you look carefully, you will notice that this is nothing but the first four elements in the first column.) In this list, the first column is the 'x' value, the second column is the 'y' value, and the third is the 'z' value. We repeat all 'z' values twice, once with 0, and once with 1 'x' value. By plotting this, we will produce a ribbon of width 1. All that remains is to call the script multiple times, and change the colouring accordingly. With these in mind, our gnuplot script reads as

reset
unset key; unset colorbox
set tics out nomirror
set border 1+2+4+8+16+32+64+256+512 back
a=0.0
b=0.3
C=5.0

set xrange [-0.5:C-0.5]; set yrange [0:14]; set zrange [-2:2]; set cbrange [-2:2]
C=C+1.0
set xlabel 'x axis [a.u.]'; set ylabel 'y axis [a.u.]';
set ticslevel 0

set table 'bg.dat'
splot x
unset table

set multiplot
set palette model RGB defined (0 0 0 0.8, 1 0.9 0.9 0.9)
splot 'bg.dat' u 1:2:(-2):3 w pm3d, '' u 1:(14):($2/14*4-2):3 w pm3d, '' u (-0.5):2:($1-2):(-0.5) w pm3d

unset border; unset tics; unset xlabel; unset ylabel; unset zlabel
set palette model HSV function 1-a/C, 1-gray, 1-a/C
sp '<./ribbon.sh ribbon.dat 1' u (a+b*$1):2:3 w pm3d
a=a+1
set palette model HSV function 1-a/C, 1-gray, 1-a/C
sp '<./ribbon.sh ribbon.dat 2' u (a+b*$1):2:3 w pm3d
a=a+1
set palette model HSV function 1-a/C, 1-gray, 1-a/C
sp '<./ribbon.sh ribbon.dat 3' u (a+b*$1):2:3 w pm3d
a=a+1
set palette model HSV function 1-a/C, 1-gray, 1-a/C
sp '<./ribbon.sh ribbon.dat 4' u (a+b*$1):2:3 w pm3d
a=a+1
set palette model HSV function 1-a/C, 1-gray, 1-a/C
sp '<./ribbon.sh ribbon.dat 5' u (a+b*$1):2:3 w pm3d
unset multiplot

Here, 'b' is the width of the ribbons, 'C' is the number of ribbons we want to plot, and 'a' is just a variable for convenience. If you do not want to have the fancy background, you can skip lines starting with 'set table' to 'unset border'. Of course, if you do this, then you have got to move the line 'unset border;...' to after the first plot. In the rest of the script, we plot the columns, one by one, and also change the colour palette, so that the ribbons will have different colours. You can skip those lines, too, if you are satisfied with one colour for all the ribbons. I should also point out that the repeated call to the script can be made automatic, if you put those three lines into another gnuplot script, and call that script via reread. I discussed how to this this in my last two posts, so if you are interested in that, you should also read those. In those posts, you will also find hints as to how to avoid having to specify the various ranges by hand, and how to get the required values with the help of gnuplot. It should not be hard to implement those things in this script, so it is easy to make a "self-running" ribbon-plot-maker.

Well, this was about the easy way to make ribbon charts. In my next post, I will show how to do this in gnuplot, without having to rely on an external script. Till then!