Abstract

High quality mathematical illustration has long been a specialized craft, akin to the layout of musical scores or mathematical formulæ. Illustrating a proof, or drawing a graph, used to be difficult, and it is easy to find errors in the drawings in old books. Drawing errors are of course a problem for the understanding of a proof. Unfortunately, such cases are still common in the current scientific literature, perhaps because mouse-made drawings do not take full advantage of the power now available. The shift of power, from hand-quality drawings to computer-quality drawings, goes back to the 1970s and started with the advent of good printers. New computer languages were developed for graphical tasks. In 1981, Brian Kernighan described his high-level PIC language for typesetting graphics [3]. At about the same time, the first version of the PostScript language was made public. Unlike languages such as PIC, PostScript was designed not as a user-oriented language but rather as a page description language to serve as an interface between graphics-producing software and printers. Printers with PostScript interpreters were then manufactured, and consequently software was written to produce PostScript files. These files were Denis Roegel is maître de conférences at Université Nancy. His

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