title: Conditional gnuplot tic formatting
body: <p>Is there a way to make the format of x/y tic-labels of a graph dependent on the value of the tic?  I'm envisioning a statement of the format</p>
  
  <pre><code>set format y ( ( ( &lt;arg&gt; &gt; 1e-3 ) &amp;&amp; ( &lt;arg&gt; &lt; 1e2 ) ) ?  "%2.1f" : "10^{%T}" )
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>so that a log scale graph would be represented as</p>
  
  <p>10^{-4}, 10^{-3}, 0.01, 0.1, 1, 10, 10^{2}</p>
  
  <p>and so on, to give a more natural representation for numbers near 1.</p>
  
  <p>I know this can be done by explicitly declaring the format, i.e.,</p>
  
  <pre><code>set xtics ( "10^{-3}" 1e-3, "0.01" 0.01, "0.1" 0.1, "1" 1, "10" 10, "10^{2)" 1e2 )
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>but I'd like to avoid being so specific, since this set of labels changes every time the range of the graph changes.  I expect the answer to this question is 'no', but here's hoping.</p>