Are plots more attractive in Prime?

[jiCavers]

Hi all,

Although Mathcad graphing is easy and mostly bug-free, the resulting plots are of pretty much of tech report quality - fine for internal and consulting reports, but not quite of publication quality (i.e., for journals). Can anyone tell me if the plots in Prime look better? If not, I'll continue with Mcad 15 and not bother installing Prime.

Thanks,

Jim Cavers

[Werner_E]

Primes plots may look a little better than those in MC15, but they lack a lot of formatting options you have in MC15 - no grid, no hiding of arguments, no title or axis labels, no legend, a low total points limit,... Andplots in Prime still are very far away from publication quality.

That said, I would suggest, as you already use MC15, in my opinion it would be the best to wait for Prime 4 or 5. Prime lacks a lot of the features MC15 has and is still an unfinished work in progress.

But you may download the Prime2 trial version and test it yourself. MC15 and Prime coexist pretty well, in fact you have to have installed the latest MC15 release to be able to convert MC15 files to the Prime2 format, as Prime would not be able to open older files on its own.

After the trialperiod Prime will fall back in a crippled version called Express, without symbolics, solve blocks etc.

[jiCavers]

Thank you, Werner. I'll stay with version 15, then, and look around for a plotting package. If nothing useful, I'll just use Matlab plots, since they are common in journals.

[Werner_E]

The issue of publication quality plots from Mathcad data came up in this forum quite some time.

Use the search function at the upper right and search for "publication quality" and read what others say or use as a solution.

[VladimirN]

Some discussions:

http://communities.ptc.com/message/198851 ("Import from MathCad to WORD"),

http://communities.ptc.com/message/197736 ("High-resolution plots in Mathcad").

[RichardJ]

Prime's plots are also not capable of producing publications quality graphics. They can't even be copied as vector graphics, and therefore (unlike the graphs from MC15) can't be cleaned up in a drawing package to male them publication quality.