General Remarks and Conventions

• The program has a menu with the common items such as File (New, Open, Save, Save as, Exit) and Help (About, Contents). These are quite straighforward in use. Files are saved with the extension VIM. If the user omits this extension, VisuMath will add it automatically.

  The print and export options in the menu are only visible if OpenGL is deactivated, since this mode has different printing and exporting capabilities. Export can be used to save the drawing visible in the graphics window to one of the available file formats. The WMF-format (Windows Metafile) is a vector based graphics format which allows rescaling without loss of quality. The JPG-format (Joint Photographic expert Group) makes use of compression and results in graphics files that can be used for web design. The BMP-format (bitmap) is typically used by Windows and does not make use of compression.

• From the main menu (from the "File" tab), it is possible to print millimeter paper. This can be useful in an educational environment. Possibly, the printer on which the millimeter paper is printed, needs to be callibrated. This is done by means of settings in the Options window. Some experimentation may be required to obtain a perfect result.
• By means of the language option in the main menu, it is possible to switch between English and Dutch. However, it is possible to add additional languages to VisuMath. Instructions for doing this can be found here.
• If OpenGL is deactivated, the left mouse button can be used to drag the origin of the graph in the graphics window. With 3-dimensional graphs, the orientation of the axes frame can be altered by dragging the small axis frame or by giving the rotation and the inclination of the frame. These angles are entered in degrees.
• Also if OpenGL is deactivated, the right mouse button will show a popup menu with different options. This menu can contain for example the copy possibility that copies the selected subject to the Windows clipboard. From here they can be pasted into other programs like a word processor or an electronic spreadsheet. Graphs can be copied as metafile or as bitmap. If they are copied as metafile, they remain scalable in other programs without loss of quality. Bitmaps on the other hand can be pasted easily in graphics editors to perform addition visual enhancements.
• The program uses a dot as decimal separator.
• In the following table, the operators that VisuMath can handle are denoted. They can, of course, be combined using traditional mathematical rules.

  Standard operators
  +	addition	-	subtraction	*	multiplication
  /	division	^	power	()	brackets
  Operators with two arguments (no differentiation possible)
  min(x,y)	minimum of x and y	max(x,y)	maximum of x and y	root(x,n)	n-th root of x
  le(x,y)	if x<= y then 1, else 0	LegendreF(phi,k)	Legendre elliptic integral of 1st kind	LegendreE(phi,k)	Legendre elliptic integral of 2nd kind
  Operators with one argument (differentiation is implemented)
  cos(x)	cosine of x	sin(x)	sine of x	tan(x)	tangent of x
  cot(x)	cotangent of x	cosh(x)	hyperbolic cosine of x	sinh(x)	hyperbolic sine of x
  tanh(x)	hyperbolic tangent of x	coth(x)	hyperbolic cotangent of x	arccos(x)	inverse of cosine of x
  arcsin(x)	inverse of sine of x	arctan(x)	inverse of tangent of x	arccot(x)	inverse of cotangent of x
  arccosh(x)	inverse of hyperbolic cosine of x	arcsinh(x)	inverse of hyperbolic sine of x	arctanh(x)	inverse of hyperbolic tangent of x
  arccoth(x)	inverse of hyperbolic cotangent of x	exp(x)	exponential function value of x	ln(x)	natural logarithm of x
  sqrt(x)	square root of x	abs(x)	absolute value of x	tri(x)	triangular function value of x
  block(x)	block function value of x	heavi(x)	Heaviside function value of x	sign(x)	sign of x
  frac(x)	fractional part of x	phase(x)	phase function value of x
  Operators with one argument (differentiation is not implemented)
  lambertw(x)	principal lambertw function value of x	lambertw2(x)	non-principal lambertw function value of x	gamma(x)	gamma function value of x
  LegendreFC(k)	complete elliptic integral of 1st kind	LegendreEC(k)	complete elliptic integral of 2nd kind
  Constants
  pi	the number pi

• The program always draws the graphics with respect to an orthonormal frame. In the case of the 2D graphs, the unity on the x- and the y-axis can be chosen differently. When the unity is given in the format “a/b” or “a*pi/b” with a and b integers, then it is represented symbolically in the graph. In other cases, the program switches to decimal notation.
• VisuMath makes use of the font LineDraw.ttf to represent the equation of a conic. If your PC produces weird characters here, this means that this font is not installed. This problem can easily be resolved by copying the font in the Fonts folder of Windows and restarting VisMath. The font can be found on www.visumath.be and in the install directory of VisuMath.
• The equations and parameter values can also be entered using the “text input” button. If this button is clicked, the following window appears:
  

  This option is useful when entering larger equations. Moreover, one has a better overview on all parameters. It is even possible to use the text input option to copy and paste all settings at once from one model to another model. Make sure however, that the same type of graph is selected.