Re: function plotting

[Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>]

Hans Hagen wrote:
> gnuplot is great indeed, but the output is rather large; it would be nice if there was a real good output mode (say, comparable to the output produced by metapost: compact, parsable);

LaTeX mode IS parsable and I often edit it manually (except the part
which does the smooth plotting of functions with lines; smooth lines
are composed from hundreds of points and that part makes the files
huge). Drawing only the points results in a reasonably small file.

> btw, is it really that difficult to use gnuplot output in context?

No. A file context.trm
(http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/gnuplot/gnuplot/term/) should
be written by modifiying the postscript/metapost/latex.trm and perhaps
some layer should be added in ConTeXt for \startgnuplot ...
\stopgnuplot.

Metapost can already be used, perhaps only some interaction with
ConTeXt is missing (setting point shapes & colors, fonts, ...
somewhere at the beginning or in a separate style file).

To answer Christophers's and Alexander's question about quality of
metapost output: I guess I mixed it up with pslatex when I was talking
about the output quality. You can't express it in percentage. See
http://pub.mojca.org/tex/gnuplot/trlin.pdf for an example graph with
latex/pslatex/mp as rendering terminal.

The second example could be easily manually tuned a bit afterwards.
Linewidths & typesetting in general is a bit worse (from my point of
view), but there's no such quality loss as if you use PNGs.

Mojca