Manual scaling of axis (poltting with boxes) in gnuplot

I’m trying to plot a really long list, which represents frequency of some data. The x axis goes from 1 to 1881, and the y goes from 1 to 1978. I tried plotting with the following configurations:

set log y 5
set log x 32
set xtics 2
set ytics 5
plot "freq.dat" w boxes

But i get the following result:

Which is clearly not good because there are these intersections of the boxes. I want to have some kind of scale that have a lot more space between 10 and 150 than the outside of this area. How can i do that? I’ve tried every combination of logs and xtics and couldn’t make it look good. The y axis seems good to me, the only problem is the spacing of x-axis. Also, i want to know how to do this in gnuplot specifically (if possible). Thanks.

Answer

It seems to me that your script overrides somewhere the default boxwidth. The default behavior is:

By default, adjacent boxes are extended in width until they touch each other. A different default width may be specified using the set boxwidth command. Relative widths are interpreted as being a fraction of this default width.

So for example this:

set terminal pngcairo enhanced
set output 'fig.png'

set log x 2
set log y 5

set yr [0.2:3125]
set xr [1:512]

set boxwidth 1 relative

set xtics 1,2,512 out nomirror
set ytics 1,5,3125 out nomirror

unset key

#set style fill pattern 6
plot 'freq.dat' w boxes lc rgb 'royalblue' lw 1.1

then yields: