I just successfully created an animated GIF with 250 frames, in Maple 13.0 on Windows. Can you tell me what version of Maple, and what platform, you are on?

There's no alternative format I'm afraid, because GIF is convenient and usually works.

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer

As I said above, 2D plots were rewritten in Maple 11 (Standard GUI), but 3D plots were not. The 3D rewrite was done in Maple 13, which you are clearly using.

Postscript is essentially a 2D format, and drawing 3D plots to it is always going to have a few problems and involve some compromise. One of the compromises we have to make is between drawing surfaces correctly and drawing sharp lines. Most users of 3D plots are drawing surfaces, and we accordingly optimized for that. Surfaces look substantially better than they did. Unfortunately a side-effect is that pure-line plots have the slightly blurry effect you see.

You can reduce the effect by making the plot much larger - as large as you can - before exporting it. That will make the underlying bitmap (what is actually being exported to postscript) denser and reduce the blur.

I hope that's helpful.

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer

As far as I know there never was an option to set the thickness of a tickmark. The tickmarks suboption to axis was only introduced in Maple 11. The option is rejected by Maple 10 Standard, and ignored by Classic versions after Maple 10.

The documentation is wrong here in saying that thickness applies to both the tickmarks and gridlines suboption.

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer

I'm afraid other change requests took priority over this one.

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer

You can create polygons from lists using the command polygonplot from the plots package. Type 'polygonplot' into the help system.

It is strongly recommended that you don't use any of the 'uppercase' plot commands like PLOT and PLOT3D. They look like commands, but they are actually the internal language used by the plotting system. They are only exposed to the user for the very, very small number of times that you need to go behind the scenes. Using them bypasses a lot of code that does error-checking and optimization, and using them is always harder than the normal commands. There is almost always a regular command that does whatever you need to do that can be done with PLOT or PLOT3D.

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer

You don't need to define colours, and the axes are up to you. Define the parts in different commands and combine them usig 'display'. Here is an example.

A:=plot3d(sin(x+y),x=-5..5,y=-5..5):

B:=plot3d(0.75,x=-5..5,y=-5.5,color=blue):

plots[display](A,B);

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer

Here is an example worksheet using the plot you created above. The animate command has been written directly into the "Plot Expression" property of the plot. The worksheet was created in Maple 13 but should load into Maple 11 and later.

View 572_StartAnim.mw on MapleNet or Download 572_StartAnim.mw
View file details

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer

Sorry I missed a vital step. You need to first create an embedded plot in your worksheet. It will be called "Plot0" by default (change it's name if you want - you can do that by using the right mouse button and bringing up the "component properties" dialog.)

Then you set the plot command on the plot, which you also do with the component properties dialog. The command you want to set is the "animate(...)" one from your worksheet. After you have set that you should see the first frame of the animation in the embedded plot.

Now set the code I gave you above on the button. Pressing the button should cause the animation to start. I hope that helps.

Hi Alex

The 'value' property of a plot component is for setting up the plot. There is a separate property for starting and stopping animation. The code you need to put in your button is this:

Do(%Plot0(play)=true);

This sets the 'play' property to true, which starts the animation. Other properties are listed at ?PlotComponent  in the help system

For more information have a look at ?DocumentTools,Do and ?DocumentTools,SetProperty

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer

Not only will a pointplot of a million points plot slowly, but my guess is that it won't be that useful. This web page www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ shows how big a million pixels is, for for most plots each point won't even get its own pixels. I would work on finding a way to represent your data without having to draw a point for each. acer's suggestion looks like a good one.

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer

Hi Zakyn

If you go to the "plot,tickmarks" page in the help system it describes several different ways to set up tickmarks. The functionality you are looking for is under "list of equations".

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer

The most likely reason is that for some reason you didn't execute the "with(plots)" statement, even though it is in the worksheet.

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer

Here's another attempt at uploading the worksheet. I would recommend downloading it and viewing locally.

View 572_RobertoPie.mw on MapleNet or Download 572_RobertoPie.mw
View file details

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer

Looking at that it wasn't that helpful, since MapleNet didn't seem to draw the worksheet right. If you download it you'll get a better idea. And sorry, the website isn't accepting links from me for some reason.

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer