Grap – A Language for Typesetting Graphs

http://www.lunabase.org/~faber/Vault/software/grap/

by henry_flower • 12 years ago

53 13 12 years ago

greenyoda• 12 years ago

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.

taeric4• 12 years ago

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.

rsc3• 12 years ago

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

taeric4• 12 years ago

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.

frik• 12 years ago

MetaPost sample file: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/papers/deco.mp

MetaPost website: http://ect.bell-labs.com/who/hobby/MetaPost.html

hebz0rl• 12 years ago

You could try tikz with latex which works very well and is very slick: Example Gallery: http://www.texample.net/tikz/ Handbook: http://mirrors.ctan.org/graphics/pgf/base/doc/pgfmanual.pdf

vit_tucek• 12 years ago

I've once redone a simple Metapost diagram in TikZ and was surprised how similar these languages are. At least for such a simple task that it was.

rsc3• 12 years ago

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

michaelmior• 12 years ago

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/

Grap – A Language for Typesetting Graphs

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