[metapost] A couple of basic questions

[Will Robertson]

On 11/02/2006, at 9:31 , Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> I'm a beginner, but if you have any suggestions about what could be
> improved in metapost output, please drop me a note. (I'm slowly
> working on an slightly improved version of metapost output; stressed
> on *slowly*.)

How do you mean with this? Yet another metapost-like program?
I know MP isn't perfect, but it's been around long enough that I hope  
it will be good enough "for ever".

On 11/02/2006, at 8:58 , Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> All the MATLAB graphics I've seen had been quite ugly.

:) It depends. It can do some stuff quite nicely, and it's very quick  
to play around with data sets (especially in 3d). I'm interested in  
MP for the publication of the data, not the inspection.

I find most of the plots out of matlab are created with no real  
understanding of how to make decent plots, and the defaults don't help.

> Recently I
> used gnuplot to produce metapost code from ASCII data files produced
> by MATLAB.
>
> The metapost output had been piped into a Perl script which fixed a
> few ugly things:  You certainly neither want labels in FORTRAN  
> ("1e-5")
> nor something like "0.00001", for example.

Oh, do you mean entirely processing the .fig format that matlab saves  
its figures in? It seems easier to me just to export the data into  
a .dat file and let metapost do the rest.

I guess I should also say I'm interested in using it for mathematica  
as well, to provide a standard way to plot the data irrespective of  
where it can from.

It does sound like there haven't been any "advances" since mpgraph,  
which is fair enough. (metafun looks very powerful but a look in the  
contents didn't reveal anything for graphs, specifically.)

Thanks for your replies,

Will