Some frequently and not so frequently asked questions about PyX

Acknowledgements

The following persons have in one way or the other, e.g. by asking good questions or providing answers, contributed to this FAQ: Walter Brisken, Alejandro Gaita-Arinyo, Pierre Joyot, Jörg Lehmann, John Owens, Michael Schindler, Gerhard Schmid, André Wobst.

• General aspects of PyX
  • The name of the game
  • Where do I get the latest version of PyX?
  • How can I determine the version of PyX running on my machine?
  • How can I access older versions of PyX?
  • Does PyX run under my favorite operating system?
  • Under which versions of Python will PyX run?
  • Does PyX provide a GUI to view the produced image?
  • Will I be able to embed PyX graphics output into an IPython notebook?
  • I am a Gnuplot user and want to try PyX. Where can I get some help?
  • Where can I get help if my question is not answered in this FAQ?
• Python
  • What is Python?
  • Where can I learn more about Python?
  • What do I need to import in order to use PyX?
  • What is a raw string and why should I know about it when using PyX?
• General aspects of plotting with PyX
  • How do I generate multipage output?
• Plotting of graphs
  • General aspects
    • How do I generate a graph from data as simply as possible?
    • How do I generate a graph of a function as simply as possible?
    • How can I stack graphs?
    • How can I plot grid data?
    • How can I access points in problem coordinates of a graph?
    • I would like a key for only some of my data sets. How do I do that?
  • Axis properties
    • How do I specify the tick increment?
    • How do I plot the zero line?
    • How can I add grid lines to a graph?
  • Data properties
    • How do I choose the symbol and its attributes?
    • How do I choose the color of the symbols?
    • How do I choose the line style?
    • How can I change the color of symbols or lines according to a palette?
    • How can I specify changing colors (or other attributes) for symbols or lines?
• Other plotting tasks
  • How can I rotate text?
  • How can I clip a canvas?
• TeX and LaTeX
  • General aspects
    • What is TeX/LaTeX?
    • Do I need to use TeX/LaTeX?
    • I don’t know anything about TeX and LaTeX. Where can I read something about it?
    • What is CTAN?
    • Is there support for ConTeXt?
  • TeX and LaTeX commands useful for PyX
    • How do I get a specific symbol with TeX or LaTeX?
  • TeX and LaTeX errors
    • Undefined control sequence \usepackage
    • Undefined control sequence \frac
    • Missing $ inserted
    • Why do environments like itemize or eqnarray seem not to work?
    • Font shape OT1/xyz/m/n undefined
    • File … is not available or not readable
    • No information for font cmr10 found in font mapping file
  • Fonts
    • I have Type1 fonts in pfa format. How do I obtain the corresponding pfb files needed by PyX?
    • I want to use a font other than computer modern roman
    • Can I use a TrueType font with PyX?
• Text output without TeX
  • General aspects
    • How can I typeset text in PyX without TeX?
    • Do I still need a TeX installation?
    • Is it possible to use the Unicode engine in addition to the TeX engine?