Thanks to all posts above for engaging with my quest for minitab style text character dotplots! Below is an example of what I'm on about (artisan construction in Mousepad) and apologies to anyone on a narrow screen where the text mode is going to get jumbled.

  0            .   .   . . . . . .    . .
 
  
  1                                     :     .:..       ..      .
    
                .
  2     .    ..::          ..
    --|-------|-------|-------|-------|-------|-------|-------|-----
     32      40      48      56      64      72      80      88 

The example is typed out from

https://support.minitab.com/en-us/minitab/help-and-how-to/gr...

The `plotrix` package for R looks hopeful (mentioned on one of the links kindly provided above) as it includes a 'minitab style dotplot' function.