Re: Draw curve by giving a mathematical function (feature request)

Hello,

I'm already working on a proposal for a related and more 
general approach to present numerical data with SVG, 
including some transformation mechanisms to apply 
mathematical operations to data sets.

The notation of only a mathematical formula could be
interesting too, however this can be quite more complex
to derive, what has to be rendered. Practically the viewer
has to transform this in something than cubic Bézier curves
for presentation with some assumptions how to get a 
proper accuracy, not necessarily a trivial problem for
an arbitrary function and a simple implemented viewer.
If there are any ideas how to specify this (and how to
draw it), I could add such a feature to my proposal.

But up to now, I'm not sure, if this is of general interest
for the 'graphical community' in general to be able to draw 
statistical data, measurements or mathematical functions 
in a simple(r) way.
For the 'science and technical community' we can assume,
that such a module would be very helpful and could result
in a dramatical increase of use of SVG in such areas
with some requirements to exchange data, present
and archive them in a simple enough and accessible
format.

Maybe to convince the SVG group to adopt such modules,
more feedback from interested people would be helpful -
as well as some information, who really wants to use such
features.

In another proposal I explored how to extent SVG to be
able to draw cubic Bézier curves in polar coordinates,
another possibly interesting feature - and for me it turned
out, that it is relatively simple to approximate this problem
with a simple script converting the curves into cartesian
coordinates as available currently in SVG only.
But I'm not sure, if this is of similar simplicty for arbitrary
functions. And due to the things I learned at university
about such mathematical functions, I'm pretty sure, that
it is often not trivial to approximate all of them automatically
to something consumable for simple SVG viewers...

Proposal for a data presentation modul:
http://purl.oclc.org/net/hoffmann/rdml/ 

Proposal for path data in polar coordinates:
http://hoffmann.bplaced.net/svgueb/ppolar.xhtml


Olaf

Received on Monday, 22 February 2010 14:40:33 UTC