Summary edit

Licensing edit

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following license:

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

gnuplot code edit

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

	This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
	You are free: to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work to remix – to adapt the work Under the following conditions: attribution – You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. share alike – If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same or compatible license as the original.
	This licensing tag was added to this file as part of the GFDL licensing update.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/CC BY-SA 3.0Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0truetrue

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

Source data edit

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.