Winplot for Windows 95/98/ME/2K/XP/Vista/7 (846K)
Click the above link to download the program. (13 Sept 12)
Page last updated: 13 Sept 12
Winplot is a general-purpose plotting utility, which can draw (and animate) curves and surfaces presented in a variety of formats.
If the program behaves strangely, there is a page of FAQ, which may help. If not, you can e-mail me at the address found in the program’s Help|About dialog box.
The on-line help pages are kept current (21 Jul 12).
Supplementary material (22 May 12) consists of animations, tutorials, teaching modules, and a font (useful for pi seekers). Donated mostly by Winplot users.
One way to insert a Winplot diagram into a webpage is to create an SVG file.
Click here for additional program information and history.
Foreign-language versions:
Chinese (traditional) (prepared with the help of Koen Kwan) (3 Jan 12)
Croatian (prepared with the help of Vjenceslav Bakovic) (13 Sep 12)
Dutch (prepared with the help of Max Blommestijn and Jos Remijn) (13 Sep 12)
French (prepared with the help of David Lemay, Marcel Druwé, and Jean-Marc Genevey) (13 Sep 12)
German (prepared with the help of Dietmar Strube) (13 Sep 12)
Hungarian (prepared with the help of Peter Csiba) (13 Sep 12)
Italian (prepared with the help of Cristiano Dané) (13 Sep 12)
Korean (prepared with the help of Changsoo Lee) (3 Jan 12)
Lithuanian (prepared with the help of Roma Greiciute) (13 Sep 12)
Polish (prepared with the help of Piotr Pawlikowski) (13 Sep 12)
Portuguese (prepared with the help of Adelmo Ribeiro de Jesus) (13 Sep 12)
Russian (prepared with the help of Anatoly Koryanov) (13 Sep 12)
Slovak (prepared with the help of Peter Michalicka) (13 Sep 12)
Spanish (prepared with the help of Martín Acosta) (13 Sep 12)
13 Sep: More developments in mapping windows, based on user feedback. The “active” button can now be used to designate which curves in the domain window are mapped into the range window. In z-plane windows, the “derive” button can be applied to the mappings themselves. Also in z-plane windows, repairs were needed because some parametric equations were not being parsed correctly. I await news of unintended consequences.
9 Sep: At the request of a user, it is now possible in mapping windows to obtain Jacobian data at points whose coordinates are entered from the keyboard.
29 Aug: A very minor change, to make the program regard the closing (or opening) of the Inventory as a reason to enable the menu item “Save”.
11 Aug: There has been a flurry of user feedback recently. The domain grid in Mapping windows can now be polar — just click the new “Polar” item in the Map menu. This addition requires a new version number. The Settings dialog in Mapping windows also needed repair, since the tangent color and secant color buttons were faulty (targeting gridline colors instead), and the now-retired “gridline” color button had no role to play. In complex Mapping windows, the “Im” function has been repaired (it was not working). The “Swap” button in 2D windows was producing strange behavior when applied to an implicit example that appeared in the shading dialog, or to an explicit function that had a locked domain. Finally, the component functions of an “Intrinsic” curve can now be plotted by opening the miscellaneous DEQ windows.
26 Jul: The first oversight has appeared. I had to add a line of code to safely open any file that includes an explicit 3D curve and its spherical indicatrices. Sorry for the inconvenience.
21 Jul: Repaired the 3D curve-family manager, which was not working reliably. It is now possible to move the 2D Slider along the graphs of indefinite integrals. Spherical indicatrices for 3D curves are now available; just click the “Frenet” button in the Inventory. This was a bit complicated to engineer, so I await reports of unintended consequences.
21 Jun: A user reported that some of his old 3D files were not opening properly. Indeed, the code that was supposed to grandfather the parsed-domain feature for 3D parametric curves was not doing its job. It should open those files now. Sorry for any inconvenience.
2 May: Corrected a minor anomaly in the newly designed SVG dialog for exporting graphics.
1 May: Dietmar Strube sent me some animated GIFs that he created with Winplot.
29 Apr: Two developments to report. First, responding to a request that Winplot offer more assistance in the creation of animations, I have uniformly extended the multiple-page export of graphics to all five formats. When it makes sense to do so, the program will ask the user to choose a parameter to index multiple-page output. While modifying the program code, I repaired an error (the feature was not working for EPS output). Second, another user pointed out that points added to the ends of 2D polar segments were not being graphed correctly (in polar mode, that is). Now they are.
13 Apr: An interesting drawback to a recent “improvement” was pointed out by a user. Last July, displayed equations were given their independence. The equations can be moved around the screen like other supplementary text, and their attributes can now be edited individually. Once the equation texts were made independent, however, it became impossible to edit their attributes in unison (making a uniform change of font size, for example). With this in mind, I have re-installed the dedicated equation font; it is listed in the new Settings dialog box. Check the box next to this item to restore the old display system, which applies the same font to all the equations.
26 Mar: At the request of a user, the 3D curve slider now shows all nine components of the Frenet (TNB) frame when that is the only one of the three calculated items to have a check.
15 Mar: I implemented an interesting request. When pi symbols are used to scale the 2D axes, fractions are now displayed vertically, instead of horizontally. If you still prefer the horizontal version, you can switch the vertical mode off; see the online help text for details. While working on this new axis-scale code, I discovered and repaired a couple of errors that were afflicting EPS and SVG output.
5 Mar: Eliminated a bug that caused sporadic crashes when retrieved files contained indefinite integrals. A user also reported that “linked” windows (in the Animation menu) were hiding behind the main (green) window when this was large enough (maximized) to cause trouble. This has been repaired, I think.
21 Feb: A few more adjustments and repairs. A user noticed that the box thickness controls in the new 3D Settings dialog box were not having any effect; this has been fixed. The tangent lines created by the 3D Slider were misbehaving in three (related) ways: They were causing crashes when the tracing cursor was assigned to them; they did not remember the placement of requested arrows; the arrow requests themselves caused the lines to re-position themselves. All of these anomalies have been fixed, I think.
12 Feb: A user reported that the slider dialog assigned to the “time” parameter (the character “@”) was crashing. Indeed it was. It seems that not many users time their animations, since this bug has been around since 17 Jan 2010 (which is when I added integer mode for animation sliders). It should behave properly now.
8 Feb: A couple of adjustments to report. Following up on a repair made last December, I taught the program to do a better job of setting up the parameter domain when an unrestricted explicit y=f(x) graph is reflected across a general axis. In response to a crash report from a veteran user, I discovered that the cause was the faulty retrieval of evaluated texts.
28 Jan: Many items to report. (1) Prompted by a veteran user, I did something that should have been done long ago — collecting several menu items (fonts, colors, pen widths, and more) into a “settings” dialog box that is opened from the Misc submenu, and that will stay open, making it easier to manage certain attributes. (2) Because some users did not want to see recent file names populating the File menu, I installed a switch in the main Windows menu, so that you can turn off this feature. (3) While making these changes, I repaired the 3D “linked” animation window, which had somehow gotten broken. (4) Another user noticed that changes to the user-function library were not generating “save?” messages when the window was closed; now they do. (5) In addition, this dialog box now accepts longer definition strings, and text is preserved exactly as it is typed by the user (no automatic conversion to upper case). (6) Yet another user report revealed that graphs of lines ax+by=c in the 2D window were disappearing if they passed exactly through a window corner; this anomaly became conspicuous when the line y=x was graphed in a perfectly square window centered at the origin. That has been repaired.
3 Jan: While upgrading the 2D implicit-region dialog box last October, I forgot to anticipate that the user might delete a curve that was used to define a region (which inevitably leads to a crash). This has been fixed.
2011 history.
