Handier Use of Scilab to Draw Fine LaTeX Figures: Usage of KETpic Version for Scilab

Abstract

In today's technological era, technologies for drawing fine figures have become necessary for effective communication in areas such as scientific research, industry, architecture, medical service, and education. In the areas of scientific research and education, computer algebra system (CAS) has become the preferred tool because of its superb drawing utilities and symbolic computation capabilities. However, embedding the graphics generated with CAS into preferred documents such as LaTeX is limited, cumbersome and inefficient. For instance, a large sized graphical file becomes an issue for fast web-tech based communication. To remedy this issue, we have developed a macro package of CAS, named KETpic, as a convenient tool for supplying high quality graphics (produced with the aid of CAS) embedded in high-quality scientific documents (edited by LaTeX). Although its versions for Mathematica and Maple have been fully developed, we recently migrated it to a popular shareware Scilab so that more people can use it. In a sense, the extent of the facilities which a CAS provides and the expense to purchase it present a "tradeoff'" relation. Consequently, some extra contrivance was necessary in the migration described above. This paper illustrates that the facilities of KETpic version for Scilab become almost equal to those of its Mathematica and Maple counterparts.