[OS X TeX] XY plots (probably OT)

[Maarten Sneep]

On 28 mei 2004, at 15:14, Gérard Degrez wrote:

>> surprised this hasn't been mentioned.
>>
>> xmgrace
>> http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/
>>
>> powerful, free, vector or raster graphics, plug-ins, etc.
>
> I second. I was just going through the answers to check whether anyone 
> mentioned Xmgrace.
> It's available on MacOSX via Fink. Very nice.

Opinions differ there ;) There are a few things to be aware of here: 
Internally it uses floats, not doubles. This may give critical rounding 
errors (trust me, I've burned myself in the past).

Another issue (TeX related) is that is (a) page based: all graphs are 
basically scaled to US-letter or A4. That in itself isn't too bad, just 
make the font-size a bit bigger. You have to set the background as 
transparent, otherwise you may get some inexplicable results when 
scaling and inserting the figure into your latex document (why is the 
caption half-missing, why all the white-space?).

One reason I don't really like the program, is because of an older 
issue (since then is has been corrected): they used to create rotated 
text by setting the label, and then rotating it as a bitmap, at fairly 
low resolution to boot. I think that that is even harder than using PS 
operators... Since that discovery I'm a bit weary of the program (plus 
the fact that they seem to re-design the user interface at each 
point-upgrade).

YMMV,

Maarten

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