Paul, Metapost can now perform calculations in double precision floating point. At this time, it is in the svn version and does not work yet as such integrated in ConTeXt (through mplib). Taco promises this for soon... The graph package is pretty clever, and I am working on proposals on how to extend/rewrite this taking advantage of the new metapost handling of large and small numbers. To plot a function, you can create a path, as in path p ; p := for i=0 upto 1000: hide (x := i/1000 ;) if (i>0) -- fi (x,exp(x)) endfor ; gplot p ; One proposal will be to make this even easier with new macros. Alan On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 12:45:12AM +0200, Paul Menzel wrote:
Dear ConTeXt folks,
I finally chose MetaPost/MetaFun [1] because of the native integration with ConTeXt and hopefully easy font handling. I want to use that throughout my document.
Of course I hit the first problem. Wanting to draw a “simple” function f like f(x) = e^x, seems hard to accomplish. I guess I should stress that MetaPost does not have a high accuracy so it might not be the best solution [5].
There seem to be quite a lot of solutions (mostly macros) on the Web for this problem so I am wondering if one of them is integrated in MetaFun.
Here are some of my findings.
1. Reading about the graph package by John D. Hobby [2] and which is also included in ConTeXt [3]. Especially I liked the automatic coordinate systems. The package seems to only be able to plot graphs with data points saved in files. So one solution would be to manually create data files with data points of the relevant function.
2. There is an example in the Drexel Physics Wiki [4].
3. Anthony Phan has also created some macros in his `mps` [5 (currently not accessible)].
4. André Heck uses the macro packages `courbes` and `grille` from Jean-Michel Sarlat to show some nice examples in his tutorial »Learning Metapost by Doing« [6].
So what do you suggest?
Thanks,
Paul
[1] http://www.ntg.nl/pipermail/ntg-context/2011/058527.html [2] http://tug.org/docs/metapost/mpgraph.pdf [3] http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Metapost [4] http://einstein.drexel.edu/liki/index.php/Metapost#Graphing_Functions [5] http://www-math.univ-poitiers.fr/~phan/downloads/metapost/statsman.pdf [6] http://staff.science.uva.nl/~heck/Courses/mptut.pdf
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