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

Hello Olaf!

Thank you for your answer!

2010/2/22 Dr. Olaf Hoffmann <Dr.O.Hoffmann@gmx.de>

> 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.
>

This is a very good news. I'm definitely going to go over your proposal and
I think I will send you my ideas If I had any (but not to this mailing
list).


> 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.
>

Yes, I agree with you. I think it would be useful mainly for educational
purposes.

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...
>

I understand that there isn't a really trivial way to implement this kind of
functionality. Maybe the work mechanism of some common open source plotters
should be studied. There is for example gnuplot and Inkscape, I guess both
of them is able to save SVG output.


> 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
>

Thank you for your work, I truly believe that your polarPath element will
get into the SVG specification in the near future.