Data display and visualisation has become more complex over the last few years. Considering that it was not trivial to begin with it is unsurprising that this is an area that throws a few problems in the path of getting your paper into press.
This cookbook will attempt to address some of the more common problem areas, however it is unlikely that it will deal with your specific graphics problem (unless you are really lucky) since the sheer scope of the topic precludes such an approach. Instead of discussing solutions to a few individual problems, we’ll focus on the tools that will allow you to solve a range of problems. Hopefully it will help you to help yourself. This document is therefore more of a collection of basic material with pointers to move advanced and in-depth documents, than a cookbook which provides set recipes to approach your graphics problems. Indeed, perhaps it should be referred to as an “ingredients” book rather than a cookbook.
The cookbook is probably best browsed in the HTML version since much of its content is pointers to packages, anonymous FTP sites and further information about the various packages, libraries and applications discussed. All of these are more easily accessed from an online copy than a bound one. I have, however, made an effort to include URLs in the text whereever possible in the LATEXversion.
Details of where the packages discussed in this cookbook can be obtained, if not explicitly mentioned in the relevant section, can be found in Section 17.