1.2 MathGL features

MathGL can plot wide range of graphics. It includes:

• one-dimensional (Plot, Area, Bars, Step, Stem, Torus, Chart, Error, Tube, Mark, see section 1D plotting);
• two-dimensional plots (Mesh, Surf, Dens, Cont, ContF, Boxs, Axial, Fall, Belt, Tile, see section 2D plotting);
• three-dimensional plots (Surf3, Dens3, Cont3, ContF3, Cloud-like, see section 3D plotting);
• dual data plots: vector fields Vect and VectC, flow threads Flow, mapping chart Map, surfaces and isosurfaces transpared or colored (i.e. its transparency or color is depend on) by other data SurfA, SurfC, Surf3A, Surf3C (see section Dual plotting);
• and so on. For detail See section MathGL core.

In fact, I created functions for drawing of all scientific plots that I know. The list of plots is enlarging, so if you need some special type of plot then write me e-mail and it will appear in new version.

I tried to make plots as well-looking as possible: surface can be transparent and highlighted by several (up to 10) light sources. Most of drawing functions have 2 variants: simple one for the fast plotting of data, complex one for specifying of the exact position of plot (including parametric representation). Resulting image can be saved in bitmap (with the help of mglGraphZB, mglGraphGL) PNG, JPEG, TIFF, BMP format or in vector EPS or SVG format (with the help of mglGraphPS), or in IDTF format (with the help of mglGraphIDTF) which can be converted in U3D.

All text are drawn by vector font, that allows high scalability and portability. Text may contain commands for: some of TeX-like symbols, changing index (upper or lower indexes) and style of font inside the text string (see section mglFont class). Texts of ticks are rotated with axis rotation. It is possible to create a legend of plot and put text in arbitrary position of plot. An arbitrary text encoding (by help of function setlocale()) and UTF-16 encoding are supported.

Special mglData class is used for data encapsulation (see section mglData class). Except safe creation and deletion of data arrays it includes functions for data processing (smoothing, differentiating, integrating, interpolating and so on) and reading of data files with automatic size determination. Class mglData can handle arrays with up to three dimensions (arrays which depend up to 3 independent indexes a_{ijk}). Using an array with higher number of dimensions is not reasonable because I do not know how it can be plotted. Data filling and modifying may be fulfilled manually or by textual formulas.

Class mglFormula class allows the fast evaluation of a textual mathematical expression (see section mglFormula class). It is based on string precompilation to tree-like code at creation of class instance. At evaluation stage code performs only fast tree-walk and returns the value of the expression. Except changing data values, textual formulas are used for drawing in arbitrary curvilinear coordinates. A set of such curvilinear coordinates is limited only by user imagination but not a fixed list like polar, parabolic, spherical and so on.