title: gnuplot: Points overlap in pm3d with a wide xrange
body: <p>I'm using gnuplot to plot three dimentions of data using pm3d. I'm trying to plot the number of times an event occurs (z value) with respect to the day of the year (x value) and hour of the day (y value).</p>
  
  <p>Using pm3d works great for up to a range of 600 (rought 2 years of data). However, the points begin to overlap each other when a wider range is required.</p>
  
  <p>I believe this is related to the fact that gnuplot isn't stretching the plot to the full size specified in set terminal. I haven't however been able to find a setting that controls this directly.</p>
  
  <p>the script I'm using:</p>
  
  <pre>
  set terminal png size 10000, 1000
  set output "%s_plot.png"
  set title "%s's"
  set ytics 1,1
  set xtics 1
  set xrange[0:%s]
  set yrange[0:23]
  set cbrange[0:%s]
  set pm3d map 
  set palette defined (0 "white", 1 "blue", 31 "red")
  splot '%s.data'
  </pre>
  
  <p>aspect of the plot for a range of [0:1000] in x:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/43evx.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/43evx.png" alt=""></a>
  </p>
  
  <p>aspect of the plot for a range of [0,100] in x:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/jHd1r.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/jHd1r.png" alt=""></a>
  </p>
  
  <p>(the images above are just snippets of the whole thing)</p>
  
  <p>What can I do to remedy this? Perhaps the solution is manually setting the points (squares) to have a fixed width.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks.</p>