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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.

I used MetaPost for a few years. It's a very quirky program and a very quirky language, like TeX itself. You can do very nice things with it but the learning curve is steep.

On of my favorite pet peeves, I think you mean the learning curve is shallow? (Is there a non physical way to think of a steep curve where it isn't actually saying that you learn a lot really quickly?) (And, this is one of my favorites, as I'm convinced I have to just be wrong.)

At any rate, what sort of quirks are you talking about? The examples I've seen so far don't look that bad, all told. If anything, they look quite nice, actually.

You're thinking it has to be time invested on the x-axis and level of expertise on the y-axis. That's certainly possible, but I think most people interpret it with level of expertise on the x-axis and (cumulative) effort invested on the y-axis. So a steep curve implies that you'd need to invest a lot of effort to become only a little bit better at something.

Sort of like climbing a steep hill because there's treasure at the top of the hill, not because climbing the hill itself is something you intrinsically care about.

I think it is more than just possible, that is how you typically show the chart of learning something. Time across the bottom with advancement on the side. Granted, I realize these charts aren't exactly viewed that often.

The steep hill is definitely the visual people think of in this regard. I just think it is strictly due thinking of a hill, though. Not because they thought of what it would mean on a chart. :) And no, I wasn't at all confused by this. Nor was anyone else, I'm sure.

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

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

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

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.

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