

Grap – A Language for Typesetting Graphs - henry_flower
http://www.lunabase.org/~faber/Vault/software/grap/

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taeric
I keep hoping someday someone will post what it is that Knuth uses for all of
his charting purposes. I have yet to find one of his books where he lacks some
really good visualizations in them. Heck, he even has dominoes inline in
Concrete Math (well, that book does... could have been one of the other
authors). His flowcharts in TAoCP are all very nicely done.

Best I have found to date is graphviz.

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rsc
He uses MetaPost. See [http://www-cs-
faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/preprints.html](http://www-cs-
faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/preprints.html) for examples.

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taeric
Thank you! Also, wow, I don't know why I never thought to just look for some
of his papers in tex form. In what I'm sure is some form of irony, I think I
actually already have some. Every now and then I just try to google "what does
he use" and never got a good result.

There a reason other folks don't use MetaPost? He really has put it to really
great use. I can't imagine quality is what keeps others from it.

~~~
rsc
I used MetaPost for a few years. It's a very quirky program and a very quirky
language, like TeX itself. You can do very nice things with it but the
learning curve is steep.

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taeric
On of my favorite pet peeves, I think you mean the learning curve is shallow?
(Is there a non physical way to think of a steep curve where it isn't actually
saying that you learn a lot really quickly?) (And, this is one of my
favorites, as I'm convinced I have to just be wrong.)

At any rate, what sort of quirks are you talking about? The examples I've seen
so far don't look that bad, all told. If anything, they look quite nice,
actually.

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stdbrouw
You're thinking it has to be time invested on the x-axis and level of
expertise on the y-axis. That's certainly possible, but I think most people
interpret it with level of expertise on the x-axis and (cumulative) effort
invested on the y-axis. So a steep curve implies that you'd need to invest a
lot of effort to become only a little bit better at something.

Sort of like climbing a steep hill because there's treasure at the top of the
hill, not because climbing the hill itself is something you intrinsically care
about.

~~~
taeric
I think it is more than just possible, that is how you typically show the
chart of learning something. Time across the bottom with advancement on the
side. Granted, I realize these charts aren't exactly viewed that often.

The steep hill is definitely the visual people think of in this regard. I just
think it is strictly due thinking of a hill, though. Not because they thought
of what it would mean on a chart. :) And no, I wasn't at all confused by this.
Nor was anyone else, I'm sure.

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rsc
The original is in Plan 9 and Plan 9 from User Space.
[http://swtch.com/usr/local/plan9/src/cmd/grap/](http://swtch.com/usr/local/plan9/src/cmd/grap/)

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michaelmior
I've been successfully using Asymptote[1] for this purpose. I find I often
have to fight a little to get things how I want, but it works quite well. The
biggest benefit to me is being able to replace a dataset and have the graphs
regenerate themselves. Grap seems worth exploring as an alternative though.

[1] [http://asymptote.sourceforge.net/](http://asymptote.sourceforge.net/)

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greenyoda
I remember using grap in the 1980s, when it was first released. I had no idea
that people would still be interested in using it today.

