I am so frustrated by Mathcad's continued plotting ineptitude I can hardly take it. We waited for years and years for the old Mathcad to add the flexibility needed to make decent looking plots and it NEVER happened. Now in my first few hours of working with Prime 2.0 (I skipped 1.0) I am already extremely frustrated by basic stuff that really makes me wonder about the development team. Come on, guys, I know you can do better than this!
Contour plots:
- z-axis scale/color bar is now included, hooray!
- however, it's location and orientation are fixed (bottom, horizontal)
- why can't I move it to the right and make it vertical?
- The labeling interval of the z-axis scale bar is tied to the number of
contour intervals. No!!! If I want a lot contours then my labels get
all mashed together and become completely unreadable. Totally
unacceptable.
- If I change the weight of the lines that separate the contours, the
line weights in the z-axis scale bar do not change correspondingly.
Come on!!
- No secondary y-axis in the second major release?? Very poor.
I need this all the time.
- I can't change the font or the font size used for the axis labels. I've
only been waiting for this for uh...let's see...how old am I now??
- Why does the x- and y-axes extend beyond the minimum value set
for the axes? This leads to odd/awkward-looking axes, at least, not
like any plots I've seen or want to make myself.
- Why can't I use a ticked/labeled box around my plots? It seems the
only option is the two intersecting axes.
- Um, how do I put titles on my plot axes? Am I just being dense here?
- Thanks for letting me rant. I guess it's export back to Excel for now
for a lot of my plots. Not that I like Excel's plots, either, believe me.
But at least with fiddling I can get a decent-looking, READABLE plot
out of Excel to present to other engineers and scientists, or include
in a paper. Not possible with what I've seen in Prime 2.0. Sigh...
