Defining the tic values

This recipe will show you how to take a little more control over where the tics appear on your axes. The following figure illustrates one use of manually specified tic marks:

The previous figure is similar to the one towards the end of Chapter 1, Plotting Curves, Boxes, Points, and more, where we introduced polar coordinates. The difference here is that we have placed our tic marks only in a certain area—that you can imagine is a region of interest—and added grid lines so the reader can more easily extract quantitative information from the graph in the region.

How to do it…

Following is the script that produced the previous figure:

set xtics axis nomirror
set ytics axis nomirror
set zeroaxis
unset border
set polar
set samples 500
set grid
set xtics 15,2,30
set ytics 10,2,20
plot [0:12*pi] t

How it works…

The lines in the previous script until the highlighted lines are the same as in the Plotting with polar coordinates recipe towards the end of Chapter 1, Plotting Curves...