Re: Plotting a graph of a function f, like f(x) = e^x, with MetaPost

From: Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>
To: mailing list for ConTeXt users <ntg-context@ntg.nl>
Subject: Re: Plotting a graph of a function f, like f(x) = e^x, with MetaPost
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:28:14 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CALBOmsZXJUo+5UR=hDcU6N0rZaZvEF+yhLr31nEcT+rxD-+qGw@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1318457618.1055.24.camel@mattotaupa>

On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 00:13, Paul Menzel wrote:
> Am Mittwoch, den 12.10.2011, 07:36 +0200 schrieb Alan Braslau:
>
>> Metapost can now perform calculations in double precision floating point.
>> At this time, it is in the svn version and does not work yet as
>> such integrated in ConTeXt (through mplib). Taco promises this for soon...
>
> great to hear that. Just to clarify, with »now« you mean MetaPost v2, do
> not you?

No, 1.750. The version 2 is not quite ready yet, but the version 1.750
already deals with floating point numbers.

> Taco, I hope you get there without a lot of problems showing
> up. If you need testers a good option would be to integrate that into
> ConTeXt Standalone as an option.

It will become part of distribution as soon as it gets out, but Taco
was busy enough organizing conference and dozens of other things. Just
give him some time. I bet that he also wants to update documentation,
do final bugfixing etc. instead of just releasing a random snapshot.

> One thing coming to my mind though that hopefully the wheel is not
> reimplemented. I guess Gnuplot can do a lot already, but on the other
> probably not as neat as Metapost when we want to color certain areas.

Can you please specify your question more precisely?

Gnuplot terminal uses metapost output. Gnuplot has some support for
transparency, even though I'm not exactly sure if one can specify
transparent colors for lines, only for fills. But you can always
simply redefine line type colors to be transparent.

Gnuplot brings all kinds of other problems like dependency on external
tool. If you have enough time to create nice plots in metapost, it is
better to avoid external dependency as a general rule. But if you have
more questions about it, feel free to ask. I might be able to help
you. The ConTeXt terminal was almost included until developers
realized that they wanted me to throw away some code for handling
units and replace that code with something buggy (like "size 10cm,10"
-> (10cm,10cm); "size 10,10cm" -> (0.35cm,10cm) or (25.40cm,10.00cm)
depending on weather). Now I need to either rewrite part of my code or
rewrite part of core code or convince them why keeping the old code.

Mojca
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