How to implement a grapher in C#

Posted by iansinke on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by iansinke
Published on 2011-01-15T13:08:58Z Indexed on 2011/01/15 13:53 UTC
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So I'm writing a graphing calculator. So far I have a semi-functional grapher, however, I'm having a hard time getting a good balance between accurate graphs and smooth looking curves.

The current implementation (semi-pseudo-code) looks something like this:

for (float i = GraphXMin; i <= GraphXMax; i++)
{
    PointF P = new PointF(i, EvaluateFunction(Function, i)
    ListOfPoints.Add(P)
}
Graphics.DrawCurve(ListOfPoints)

The problem with this is since it only adds a point at every integer value, graphs end up distorted when their turning points don't fall on integers (e.g. sin(x)^2).

alt text

I tried incrementing i by something smaller (like 0.1), which works, but the graph looks very rough.

alt text

I am using C# and GDI+. I have SmoothingMethod set to AntiAlias, so that's not the problem, as you can see from the first graph. Is there some sort of issue with drawing curves with a lot of points? Should the points perhaps be positioned exactly on pixels?

I'm sure some of you have worked on something very similar before, so any suggestions? While you're at it, do you have any suggestions for graphing functions with asymptotes? e.g. 1/x^2

P.S. I'm not looking for a library that does all this - I want to write it myself.

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