This post in reply to the Post, Cry for help: What about plot sizing for students??

The goal here is to produce plots for inclusion inside Worksheets or Documents of the Standard GUI at specific sizes.

[update: Maple 18 has this as a new feature for 2D plots. See the `size` option described on ?plot,options]

When manually resizing an existing plot, using the mouse pointer, there is no visual cue as to what pixel size has been attained. Hence any worksheet author who wishes to produce a plot of size 600x600 is presented with two barriers. The first is that resizing must be done manually, and the second is that there is no convenient mechanism showing the actual size attained.

The `Resize` package attempts to address these barriers by allowing construction of a plot, inside a worksheet, with programmatically specified width and height in pixels.

The default behaviour of the package is to produce the plot inside a new Worksheet, from whence it may be selected and copied. An optional behaviour is to show the constructed plot inside a Task Template (a form of help-page), where it may be previewed for correctness and inserted into the current Worksheet or Document at the press of a single button.

It appears to function for both 2D and 3D single plots.

It won't work for so-called Array plots, which are collections of multiple plots displayed side-by-side inside a worksheet table.

This first version is a bit rough. The plot is currently being inserted as input, which is why it isn't centered on the page. I suspect that it would be best to insert the first argument (eg. a `plot` call) as input to an execution group, and then have the plot be the output. That would look, and hopefully act, just as usual. And with the plot call inserted as input, the original `Resize` call could be neatly deleted if desired.

To install this thing, use the File->Open from the Standard GUI's menubar. Choose this .mla file as the thing to open. (You may have to slide a scrollbar, and select a view of "All Files", in order to see it in the pop-up File Manager.) Double-clicking on the file, to launch it, should ideally also open it but it looks like that functionality broke for Maple 15.

Resize_installer.mla

Alternatively, you could run the command,

march( 'open', "...full...path...to...Resize_installer.mla");

The attached .mla archive is a (graphically) self-unpacking installer, when opened in this way.

The bundled materials include a pre_built .mla containing the package itself, the source code and a worksheet that rebuilds it from source if desired, a short example worksheet, and a worksheet that rebuilds the whole installer (and re-bundles all those files into it). I used the `InstallerBuilder` to make the self-unpacking .mla installer, as I think it's a handy tool that is under-appreciated (and, alas, under documented!).

It's supposed to work without the usual hassle of having to set `libname`. This is an automatic consequence of the place in which it gets installed.

It seems to work in Maple 12, 14, and 15, on Windows 7. Let me know if you have problems with it.

acer


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