ploticus: dist prefab

## dist prefab | Welcome Gallery Handbook |
| Manual page for dist_prefab(PL)

## EXAMPLE 1

    	pl -prefab dist fld=1  data=data6  curve=yes  binsize=0.05 \
    	  barwidth=0.08  ygrid=yes

    	data6 file:
    		0.017
    		0.269
    		0.178
    		..etc.

## EXAMPLE 2

      pl -prefab dist  fld=1  data=data8  cats=yes  yrange=0  \
         stubvert=yes  barwidth=0.05   ylbl="# Hits"   order=rev

      data8 file:
    	home
    	kwindex
    	details
    	browseform
    	..etc.

How to run these examples

## DESCRIPTION

dist is a prefab that computes and displays a frequency distribution (histogram) on a data field.`` The data file does not need to be ordered in any particular way.`` The field may contain continuous numeric data, or alphanumeric values.`` Continuous numeric data is the default, but the cats option may be used to produce category distributions (each unique value having a bar).`` With continuous numeric data, "bins" will be set up and values will be placed into these bins (any alpha values will be lumped into one "alpha" category).

This prefab is based on proc tabulate and proc bars.`` A user-contributed prefab called multidist is also available; it can do multiple, overlaid frequency distributions.``

## HINT

If no bars are appearing, try specifying bar size, eg.`` `barsize=0.1`. This glitch is due to the fact that default bar widths are related to data space.``

## PARAMETERS

  Standard prefab parameters are all supported except x, y, and err.`` data is required.``
  fld (required) is the data field that the frequency distribution will be computed on
  binsize is the size of one "bin" in numeric distributions.``
  cats may be given as `yes` if fld is not continuous numeric data.``
  curve may be given as `yes` or as a linedetails attribute to cause a bspline curve to be rendered along with the histogram.``
  color is the color of the bars (default = pink)
  barwidth is the width of the bars in absolute units.``
  savetable may be given in order to save a text representation of the computed frequency distribution. It may be a file name, `stderr`, or `stdout`.``
  order controls the order in which bars are drawn from left to right. By default this is `natural` (alphabetical order). Allowable values are `mag` (from low to high), and `rev` (high to low).``
  data display engine
  Copyright Steve Grubb

Markup created by unroff 1.0, `` `` December 10, 2002.