Re:Pen plotters: not just output devices (2016)
by zabzonk on Saturday May 01, 2021 @02:55PM
(#27008803)
You may be right - this was a looong time ago. Calculating the angles from the data is not difficult though, so I may have forgot that I did it. I can't really imagine calculating and placing the labels myself though, but perhaps I was cleverer then!
Anyway, the HP pen plotter we had in the early 1980s was a very impressive device, when what we had were Z80 based computers driving them.
In the most recent reference guide I found just now, it seems you can draw a segment of a pie chart using a single EW (Edge Wedge) instruction but, for a complete pie chart, this method would require you to calculate the angles of each segment yourself. And of course to add the labels yourself. Perhaps I'm looking in the wrong place or perhaps the instruction to draw a whole pie chart has been deprecated.