Tariq

What do people use / recommend for plotting *publication quality* plots of mathematical functions.

Not plotting data, plotting functions.

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In opensource, matplotlib is huge, but it is fundamentally plotting data points, and plotting functions means creating domain data points and calculating their mapping, and plotting that. Unsatisfactory imo.

Similarly for the other tool, ggplot2 in R, it is designed for data.

In proprietary software, Mathematica is also huge, but imho their plots have always look janky and not publication quality.

What I haven't explored is "latex packages" which purport to do function plotting. I'd be surprised if they did fancy things like not crashing at singularities. Is this what authors use for polished publications?

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Attached image is mathics3, an open source implementation of the Mathematica language. Looks fine for blogs, but not for a book typeset in the style of the classic Springer texts imho,

#opensource #maths #visualisation #plotting

Apr 9 at 9:41pmWeb
Show threadperdidonavida1d ago
@rzeta0 have you tried labplot?
Show threadTariq1d ago

@perdidonavida

thanks I'll check it out, I didn't know this existed

Show thread\u1f0a123h ago
@rzeta0 latex with tgfplots
Show threadTariq20h ago

@bnlandor

thanks I'll check it out

Show threadyak23h ago
@rzeta0 Don't know if the function/data distinction is all that meaningful, since anything that plots functions is at most providing a shortcut for data plots, and the results are sometimes worse than if you did it yourself (e.g. gnuplot).

I have found Makie in the julia universe very enjoyable. Here's a plot and a screenshot of the REPL session I used to make it. With CairoMakie precompiled it took less than 30 seconds to do this.
Show threadBenoît Régent-Kloeckner21h ago
@rzeta0 I would look at tikz in LaTeX, but I don't know it enough to ensure it does what you want.
Show threadvoxal20h ago
@rzeta0 I can recommend LaTeX with Asymptote.
Show threadTariq18h ago

@voxal

very interesting software - I didn' know about it

Show threadAleph ω+419h ago
@rzeta0 in my limited experience I was not able to get away from specifying an explicit set of domain points (e.g. some equally spaced points). I have used tikz and gnuplot, with tikz being easier to style to a professional standard.