I am "revisiting" a problem I visited in 1996, using whatever version of MathCad was current at the time. It involves projecting a beam of light on a cylindrical surface where you move the beam left and right (say from -40 deg to +40 deg), and want to "paint" a horizontal line on the (cylindrical) screen. The problem comes if you need to angle the beam above or below the horizontal -- it will draw a "Smiley", curving up or down as it moves from the midline. [Note this is an oversimplification of the problem, but this is the general idea].
I'm revisiting this using MathCad Prime 2.0. When I plot my "Smiley" (in my case, I'm going ±20 degrees and angling the beam down, so that it moves from about -14.5° at the ends to about -15.3° in the middle). The problem is the "shape" of the plot -- Prime wants to make the plot square, which exaggerates (a lot) the 1° vertical travel over the 40° horizontal range. I can, of course, "compress" the vertical by setting the max and min Y values, and I can "stretch" the plot horizontally to make it somewhat rectangular, but I cannot figure out how to either compress or stretch the vertical dimension.
Never mind -- I just found it! If you move your cursor around the edge of the plot, you'll (most of the time) see a 4-pointed Arrow cursor, which means "Move the plot in 2 Dimensions", i.e. "Relocate the plot". But if you watch carefully, when the cursor is near the center of the top or bottom edge, it can changes to a 2-headed Arrow, which is the "Resize this dimension" feature I was unable to find (until I started writing this Discussion Topic). Needless to say, I did look in the MathCad Prime Help documentation (searching for Plot Height), and in the PTC Community (same search topic), but couldn't find anything.
Is this material available? Where do I find it (what is the appropriate Search topic)? If not, please consider providing more documentation on Plots, especially on the methods available to tailor the plot to our needs.
Bob Schor
