LaTeX pictures: best way to typeset graphs

[Denis Girou]

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The following message is a courtesy copy of an article
that has been posted to comp.text.tex as well.

>>>>> "Neil.Zanella" == Neil Zanella <nzanella at tulip.math.ualberta.ca> writes:

    Neil.Zanella> OK, I looked at PSTricks and friends but it did not seem like
    Neil.Zanella> any of them could do exactly what I wanted although PSTricks
    Neil.Zanella> seemed to be able to do almost what I was looking for.
    Neil.Zanella> As a simple example, is there a simple way to typeset the following
    Neil.Zanella> picture with pstricks? What is the easiest (right) way to do this?
    Neil.Zanella> I can do it with eepic but it takes a while to compute the points.
    Neil.Zanella> What takes the longest is placing all the labels.

    Neil.Zanella>                       ^ x
    Neil.Zanella>                       |
    Neil.Zanella>                       |
    Neil.Zanella>                     1 -            1
    Neil.Zanella>                       |     f(x) = - sin(x)
    Neil.Zanella>                       |            2
    Neil.Zanella>                   1/2 -  xxxxx
    Neil.Zanella>                       | x     xx
    Neil.Zanella>                       |x        x 
    Neil.Zanella>   --|-----|-----|-----------|-----|-----|-----|-----|----->
    Neil.Zanella>                       |    Pi/2   Pi   3Pi/2  2Pi         y
    Neil.Zanella>                       |            x        x
    Neil.Zanella>                   1/2 -             x     xx
    Neil.Zanella>                       |              xxxxx
    Neil.Zanella>                       |                
    Neil.Zanella>                     1 -
    Neil.Zanella>                       |

    Neil.Zanella> If it can do this in a simple way than it can do pretty much everything
    Neil.Zanella> I was looking for.

  As people already tell you, there are a lot of packages to do such kind of
graphs. Here is a solution with PSTricks (the only not obvious part for
beginners is probably the way to have automatically graduations printed as
multiples of Pi).


\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{pstcol} % To use the standard "color" package with PSTricks
\usepackage{pst-plot}

\pagestyle{empty}

\begin{document}

\psset{yunit=3}

\psframebox[framesep=0]{%
\begin{pspicture}(-1.1,-1.1)(7,1.4)
  \psaxes[Dx=1.5708,Dy=0.5,labels=y]{->}(0,0)(0,-1.1)(7,1.1) % Pi/2 = 1.5708
  \rput(1.5708,-0.15){$\frac{\Pi}{2}$}
  \rput(3.1416,-0.15){$\Pi$}
  \rput(4.7124,-0.15){$\frac{3 \Pi}{2}$}
  \rput(6.2832,-0.15){$2 \Pi$}
  \rput(3,1.3){\Large Sinus curve}
  \rput(6.8,-0.1){$y$}
  \rput(-0.3,1.15){$x$}
  \rput[r](7,0.8){\textcolor{red}{$f(x) = \frac{1}{2} \sin (x)$}}
  % 1 radian = 57.2958 degrees
  \psplot[linecolor=red]{0}{6.2832}{x 57.2958 mul sin 0.5 mul} % sin(x) / 2 
\end{pspicture}}

\vfill

\psframebox[framesep=0]{%
\begin{pspicture}(-1.1,-1.1)(13,1.4)
  \psaxes[Dx=1.5708,Dy=0.5,labels=y]{->}(0,0)(0,-1.1)(13,1.1) % Pi/2 = 1.5708
  \rput(1.5708,-0.15){$\frac{\Pi}{2}$}
  \rput(3.1416,-0.15){$\Pi$}
  \multido{\Npos=4.7124+3.1416,\Icoef=3+1}{3}{%
    \rput(\Npos,-0.15){$\frac{\Icoef \Pi}{2}$}}
  \multido{\Npos=6.2832+3.1416,\Icoef=2+1}{3}{%
    \rput(\Npos,-0.15){$\Icoef \Pi$}}
  \rput(7,1.3){\Large Sinus curve}
  \rput(12.8,0.1){$y$}
  \rput(-0.3,1.15){$x$}
  \rput(7,0.8){\textcolor{cyan}{$f(x) = \frac{1}{2} \sin (x)$}}
  \psplot[linecolor=cyan]{0}{12.5664}{x 57.2958 mul sin 0.5 mul} % sin(x) / 2 
\end{pspicture}}

\end{document}

Denis Girou
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