Math Graph Symbols, Characters, or Glyphs in LaTeX

Question

I'm trying to qualitatively describe an equation and would like to do so by using little pictures of the functions involved.

Therefore, I am looking for glyphs or a way of drawing cute little pictures of a sine wave, a gaussian, a logistic (or sigmoid) function, and a step function.

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

You can plot these functions in a separate document like this:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{tikz}

\usepackage[active,tightpage]{preview}
\PreviewEnvironment{tikzpicture}

\begin{document}

\begin{tikzpicture}[scale=0.1]
    \draw plot [domain=0:2*pi](\x, {sin(\x r)});
\end{tikzpicture}

\end{document}

I would use a naming scheme like img_sin.tex. Then you can include them easily as:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{graphicx}
\newcommand\splot[1]{\includegraphics{img_#1}}

\begin{document}

The sinus looks like \splot{sin}.

\end{document}

Of course you can make the plots as fancy as you like.

Note that I chose a fixed scaling factor of 0.1 which looked good for me. It might be possible to scale the image to the current font height on inclusion, but I'm not sure how to do that.