metapost-matlab – METAPOST data plotting in Matlab style

Mat­lab has pow­er­ful data plot­ting abil­ity, but one an­noy­ing prob­lem pre­vents it from be­ing per­fect: when you in­crease the linewidth, the dot­ted line size stays the same, so the plot­ted line no longer looks like a dot­ted line.
Another prob­lem is Mat­lab's bugs: it of­ten cuts away some curves and cap­tions. And, of course, Mat­lab is ex­pen­sive. On the other hand, the free Gnu­plot doesn't pro­duce very sat­is­fac­tory vi­sual ef­fects ei­ther.
The au­thor got ac­cus­tomed to Mat­lab's easy in­ter­face, and wanted to in­te­gerate the pow­er­ful graphic func­tions of METAPOST with the in­ter­face of Mat­lab. The out­come was mat­lab.mp. It is based on graph.mp (part of the METAPOST dis­tri­bu­tion). The pack­age col­lects data into 2D ar­rays, and re­mem­bers the line styles, so it's easy to plot out leg­ends. The pack­age fea­tures:
– All kinds of line colour, width, style (dot­ted/dashed, etc), and mark­ers (the code may eas­ily be ex­panded); – Easy in­ter­face, very sim­i­lar to Mat­lab; – The full power of la­tex is avail­able in cap­tions and leg­ends, by us­ing the la­texmp pack­age.