I wanted to plot some of the figures found in the book I am reading. I first tried LabPlot, but it was too painful to use. I then tried gnuplot; it was pretty good, but has some problems. I cannot make parametric 3-D curves. It has nice hidden surface removal, but its colour surfaces are terrible. The documentation says, Colored quadrangles are plotted one after another. When plotting surfaces (`at s`), the later quadrangles overlap (overdraw) the previous ones. (Gnuplot is not virtual reality tool to calculate intersections of filled polygon meshes.)
I don’t understand how they can do such a nice job of hidden surface removal while at the same time plot quadrangles even worse than the naïve algorithm of sorting the quadrangles by depth.
I’m tempted to write my own Haskell plotting library. Is there any other nice free tool out there for making pretty parametric plots?