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Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License.http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.htmlGFDLGNU Free Documentation Licensetruetrue

The following is the gnuplot code to generate this plot. Additional processing was done in inkscape to tidy up the label font sizes, force a white background, and center the title to satisfy the mediawiki rendering engine. The gnuplot code is released under both GFDL and GPL, take your pick.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License.http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.htmlGFDLGNU Free Documentation Licensetruetrue

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This work is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or any later version. This work is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See version 2 and version 3 of the GNU General Public License for more details.http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.htmlGPLGNU General Public Licensetruetrue

# Save as an SVG
set terminal svg size 600 500

# Set the title
set title "US Postage Stamp Rates"

# Modify the x-axis
set xlabel "Date"
set xdata time
set timefmt "%m/%d/%Y"
set xtics rotate ('1/1/1880', '1/1/1890', '1/1/1900', '1/1/1910', '1/1/1920', '1/1/1930', '1/1/1940', '1/1/1950', '1/1/1960', '1/1/1970', '1/1/1980', '1/1/1990', '1/1/2000', '1/1/2010')
set format x "%m/%d/%Y"
set xrange ['1/1/1875':'1/1/2015']

# Modify the y-axis
set ylabel "Price (US Dollars)"
set format y "$%.2f"

# Output file
set output "plot.svg"

# Push key to top-left
set key top left

# Ready, set, plot!
plot "data.txt" using 1:2 title 'Issued Rates' with steps, \
   "data.txt" using 1:3 title 'Adjusted Rates (1984 Dollars)' with steps

This source data was taken from History of United States Postal Service rates (exact revision used)

# Date                 Price           Adjusted price in 1984 dollars
7/1/1885               0.02            0.20
11/3/1917              0.03            0.23
7/1/1919               0.02            0.12
7/6/1932               0.03            0.23
1/1/1952               0.03            0.11
8/1/1958               0.04            0.14
1/7/1963               0.05            0.16
1/7/1968               0.06            0.17
5/16/1971              0.08            0.20
3/2/1974               0.10            0.20
9/14/1975              0.10            0.19
12/31/1975             0.13            0.24
5/29/1978              0.15            0.23
3/22/1981              0.18            0.20
11/1/1981              0.20            0.22
2/17/1985              0.22            0.20
4/3/1988               0.25            0.21
2/3/1991               0.29            0.21
1/1/1995               0.32            0.21
1/10/1999              0.33            0.20
1/7/2001               0.34            0.19
6/30/2002              0.37            0.21
1/8/2006               0.39            0.20
5/14/2007              0.41            0.21
5/12/2008              0.42
5/11/2009              0.44
1/22/2012              0.45
1/27/2013              0.46

 

This W3C-unspecified plot was created with Gnuplot.