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## 7.10 Handling date/time scales

With date/time scale we refer to the plotting of data where the independent variable (X-axis) de-nominates a time value. This could for example be the temperature measured in intervals during a day.

From version 1.18 and onwards there are two principal ways of handling date/time scales. The manual way and fully automatic using the special "dat" scale. For most cases the automatic "dat" scale is the preferred choice but in rare circumstances it might be more appropriate to use the manual way since it gives slightly more control (but not that much) of the overall handling of scales.

To be able to use a date/time scale at all we will assume that the data points are represented by both an X coordinate (time-value) and a Y-value (anything else wouldn't make sense).

We first start by describing the use of the "dat" scale.

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