Asymptote is a powerful descriptive 2D and 3D vector graphics language for technical drawing, inspired by MetaPost but with an improved C++-like syntax. It provides for figures the same high-quality level of typesetting that LaTeX does for scientific text. Asymptote is a programming language as opposed to just a graphics program. It can exploit the best features of script (command-driven) and graphical user interface (GUI) methods. High-level graphics commands are implemented in the language itself, allowing them to be easily tailored to specific applications.
| Tags | Scientific/Engineering Visualization education Text Processing Markup TeX/LaTeX Mathematics multimedia Graphics Editors Vector-Based 3D Modeling |
|---|---|
| Licenses | LGPL |
| Operating Systems | Mac OS X Unix POSIX Linux Windows Windows Windows |
| Implementation | C++ |
Recent releases


Changes: A boolean targetsize option can be used to draw 3D labels with the apparent size they would have on the target plane. The camera adjustments were fixed; the autoadjust flag is respected. Missing path3 functions such as endpoint were added. The doubleclick timeout under Windows was fixed. A ConTeXT font bug workaround is illustrated in contextfonts.asy. File associations are now used under Windows for psviewer, pdfviewer, display, and animate. Single quotation marks are now allowed in filenames. The lmfit example illustrates Levenberg-Marquardt nonlinear least-squares fitting.


Changes: The interface for changing the precision for XDR/binary files was simplified. File parameters can now be queried as virtual members. The zoom/menu action was improved to emulate a double-click and assigned to the right mouse button again. A left-button binding bug was fixed. Rendering settings were added. The OpenGL thread now exits gracefully, and idle state and other parameters are properly reset on quitting. Lighting is now initialized only in home(). Animations with global=false were fixed. An improved (and free) psview PostScript viewer is now suggested for MS-DOS users.


Changes: The perp vector calculation in the solids module was fixed. A bug in the mouse motion functions was fixed. A pan action was added to the OpenGL renderer; the Camera (c) menu item now outputs all camera settings. The default right mouse button mouse binding was changed from "zoom/menu" to "zoom". Dynamic time stepping was fixed in the ode module; the "integrate" routines now return the array of computed values. == and != operators were added for all built-in arithmetic 2D arrays. A segmentation fault was fixed. The etc/fstab kludge for Cygwin 1.7 was removed.


Changes: Thread locking issues were fixed. The line granularity is now respected when drawing thick curved lines. A bug in FSAL ODE integrators when using a fixed time step was fixed. Missing miterlimit defaults were added. Xasy was updated to use Python 2.6.2 and Imaging-1.1.7b1. Obsolete patches were removed. The install-prebuilt target omits texhash and does not attempt to install PNG files for asymptote.info. A configuration problem with --disable-gc was fixed. The 3D mouse bindings are now customizable. Support was added for generating syntax highlighting for the KDE editor Kate.


Changes: Splined parametric surfaces have been implemented; a bug in the Cartesian splined surface routines has been fixed. An ode module for solving ordinary differential equations has been added. A bug in maxtimes and mintimes has been fixed. A Levenberg-Marquardt nonlinear fitting routine has been added. The "format" command now returns TeX-compatible output only in math mode. A path3 label alignment problem has been fixed. The MSWindows support for TeXLive 2009 has been fixed.