johnnywang has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi monks, I'd appreciate any info on this topic.

I'm just starting to think about writing a perl program to make it easy to draw euclidean geometry graphs. You see, I'm trying to teach my daughter some serious geometry, but am getting tired of drawing bad graphs. I'm wondering, first of all, what tools those book publisher use to draw those graphs for books. But I'm more interested in writing a perl program to do that. I'm not looking for a click-drag-click kind of tool like visio, but a tool to draw a graph from a description file. For example, to draw a graph corresponding to the problem of "Prove the three angle bisectors of a triangle intersect at one point", I'd like to be able to say: "draw a trangle ABC in general position, draw bisector from A intersecting BC at D,...,", and the program just read in this description and produce the graph.

So I guess my questions are: is there something like this out there? do you think this is feasible? any suggestions?

Thanks.

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Re: perl for graphing Euclidean geometry
by keszler (Priest) on Aug 06, 2004 at 00:42 UTC
    Gnuplot is a nice, command oriented tool for graphs, and there are a few gnuplot-related perl modules.

    I've used gnuplot with Perl in a couple of programs, to good effect.

Re: perl for graphing Euclidean geometry
by zentara (Cardinal) on Aug 06, 2004 at 13:06 UTC
    If you have Tk installed, type "widget" in an xterm and scroll down to "User Contributed Demonstrations". Look at "Plot a series of continuous functions on a Canvas." It may give you a good start.

    I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh