# Range chart by category and value

Basically I've been writing my work with XeLaTeX enthusiastically now for about a year and love it, but today for the first time I tried to draw a graph and realised I still have a lot to learn. Unfortunately, I couldn't quite work out how to create a chart looking like the one in my (hastily sketched) image, and I couldn't extract the useful information from PGFPlots manual without getting totally lost.

The chart (graph?) I want to make should be of distinct categories on the x axis, with lines representing ranges of values on the y. I feel certain this is simple but just can't seem to get a handle on it.

Any guidance would be so greatly appreciated.

I would use the error bars mechanism for drawing the lines. For getting text labels, I would simply provide the list of labels using xticklabels={A,B,C}.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pgfplots}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\begin{axis}[
xtick=data, % Only put labels at positions of data points
xticklabels={A,B,C} % Provide text for labels
]
only marks, % No lines between the points
mark=empty, % No marks at the points
error bars/y dir=plus,  % Error bars in the positive direction
error bars/y explicit,  % We provide the values for the error bars
error bars/error mark=empty,    % No markers at the end of the error bars
error bars/error bar style={thick}  % Use thick lines for the error bars
] table [
y error expr=\thisrow{Y2} - \thisrow{Y1} % Calculate the length of the error bars
] {
X Y1 Y2
1 100 110
2 110 120
3 100 120
};
\end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

• You sir are a scholar and a gentleman. Thanks for the comments too, really clear. – alice19 Sep 15 '13 at 18:27