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Maxima uses an external plotting package to make the plots (see the
section on Plotting Formats
). The plotting functions calculate a
set of points and pass them to the plotting package together with a set
of commands. That information can be passed to the external program
either through a pipe or by calling the program with the name of a file
where the data has been saved. The data file is given the name
maxout_xxx.format
, where xxx
is a number that is unique
to every concurrently-running instance of Maxima and format
is
the name of the plotting format being used (gnuplot
,
xmaxima
, mgnuplot
, gnuplot_pipes
or geomview
).
There are commands to save the plot in a graphic format file. In those cases, the
file maxout_xxx.format
created by Maxima includes commands that will
make the external plotting program save the result in a graphic
file. The default name for that graphic file is
maxplot.extension
, where extension
is the extension
normally used for the kind of graphic file selected.
The maxout_xxx.format
and maxplot.extension
files are created
in the directory specified by the system variable
maxima_tempdir
. That location can be changed by assigning to
that variable (or to the environment variable MAXIMA_TEMPDIR
) a string
that represents a valid directory where Maxima can create new files. The
output of the Maxima plotting command will be a list with the names of
the file(s) created, including their complete path.
If the format used is either gnuplot
or xmaxima
, the
external programs gnuplot
or xmaxima
can be run, giving it
the file maxout_xxx.format
as argument, in order to view again a plot
previously created in Maxima. Thus, when a Maxima plotting command
fails, the format can be set to gnuplot
or xmaxima
and the
plain-text file maxout_xxx.gnuplot
(or maxout_xxx.xmaxima
) can be
inspected to look for the source of the problem.
The additional package draw provides functions similar to the ones
described in this section with some extra features. Note that some
plotting options have the same name in both plotting packages, but their
syntax and behavior is different. To view the documentation for a
graphic option opt
, type ?? opt
in order to choose the
information for either of those two packages.
‘Category: Plotting’
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