I have TikZ code that draws an ellipse. Here is the code that, AFAIK, draws the actual ellipse:
\draw [rotate around={0.:(0.,0.)},line width=0.8pt] (0.,0.) ellipse (5.cm and 4.cm);
Can anyone tell me how draw
actually produces the line-work, i.e., is it behind-the-scenes using an interpolation algorithm to create coordinate points?
I've used Geogebra to generate TikZ code of a graph, and occasionally it simply brute-forces the shape of a line or object by generating tons of individual coordinates, making it rather unwieldy to put into a LaTeX document.
This, however, suggests to me the actual drawing of a shape with just a one-liner like above is some sort of interpolation, i.e. plotting per the ellipse formula a minimum base set of points, then interpolating the rest to fill in between them. I've read that this is typical, since using the ellipse formula to produce all of the points would be very resource and time expensive. Does anyone know what is going on under the hood?