On Sun, Nov 02, 2003 at 11:16:47PM +0100, Peter Ulrich Kruppa wrote: > I am going to introduce Maxima to my students. They will have enough to do > learning calculus and getting used to Maxima's command-line statements. > Fussing around with gnuplot,too, will be overkill. > And of course plots - especially of parametric functions - will be the > first thing, they will want to see. > > And: gnuplot only produces box-plots, no y- vs x-axis diagrams, to which > they are used. For an experienced mathematician this is no problem, for a > beginner it's just another useless difficulty. My students have been using openmath for the plots, without problem. None of them has run into the window-manager problem you have, so the can access the menu and use menu options to save the file as postscript. It does not have great quality, but if you tell your students to always use "mark" to select a plot region, I think the output is acceptable. For book quality results I use my own postcript macros which I hope I can incorporate some day in openmath. (see example.ps attached; the actual plot is done in the last 23 lines after %%Page: 1 1) One thing I always have to remind my students is that if they work in xmaxima (the only option for those using Windows), they must end every plot2d or openmath_curves command with ";" and not with "$"; otherwise openmath will get stuck.
Attached file: example.ps
Attached file: example.pdf