Tariq1d ago

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

Show threadyak
@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.
Apr 10 at 5:19amWeb