Re: Euclidean geometry in octave

[mhagger]

> I often need drawings for Euclidean geometry problems in 
> documents.  I don't like any of the software I've seen, so
> I would like to do it in Octave.
> 
>   1. Am I re-inventing the wheel?  In other words, does there
>      exist a perfectly reasonable Octave package which already 
>      does this?
>   2. I've tried a few simple things, and have immediately come
>      up against a plotting problem: I can't find a plotting
>      command that forces the scales on the two axes to be the
>      same.  For example, what looked like perfectly good circles
>      and squares on my X11 screen come out as ellipses and 
>      parallelograms on Postscript output. So:
>        How does one force a 2D plot to have equal scales
>        on both axes?

One option is to use

octave> gset size ratio X

before you print the graph as a Postscript file.  Here X is the ratio of Y
to X scale, see gnuplot help on "set size" for more info on "set size" (I
was using this about 2 minutes ago which is why I managed to reply so
promptly!). 

Hope this helps.

Mark