Re: [Groff] drawing a figure

[Ted Harding]

On 10-Feb-00 Nicola Bernardini wrote:
> Yesterday, Werner LEMBERG mi scrisse cio` che segue:
> 
>> >     I am new to groff. Is there some free software in Linux like
>> > "grap" to generate plot figures?
>> 
>>   http://www.lunabase.org/~faber/Vault/software/grap/
> 
> Is that a new implementation? Due to the lack of a public 'grap',
> I switched to 'gnuplot' (which can produce pic code just like grap,
> or eps, or whatever...) which works perfectly well with groff and
> which seems to be a better solution nowadays
> (i.e. has multiplots, lots of internal functions etc.). Would there
> be any good reason to switch back to grap?

It depends. Use whatever suits your purpose best.

I write a lot of technical documents, including many diagrams.
In many cases, I simply do what you do (import output from
gnuplot as PS or pic, or PS output from other packages).
Sometimes, it is convenient to enter a pic description
directly into the groff source (especially if it is the
graph of a computed function, since pic is quite a poweful
mathemtical programming language in its own right).

Occasionallly, I use grap. However, the number of occasions on
which it is really more convenient to use grap, rather than
doing it directly in pic, is relatively small.

I find that grap is handy for "quick and dirty" graphs, since
all you need is to hand it the coordinates of the points, and
it will do all the business of working out suitable axes,
scales and tic-marks, etc; but I have enough practice at pic
that it's not a lot of effort to do it in pic in the first place,
especially if you want to "tune" the result to look really
good. I find that the deeper resources of grap are a bit hard
to learn to use well. But, again, that's what suits my purposes ...

Ted.

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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <address@hidden>
Date: 10-Feb-00                                       Time: 23:40:54
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