On these webpages ASCIIsvg is used to produce full-page graphs of basic functions. You can save these pages and modify them for your own requirements (the ASCIIsvg commands embedded in the webpage are quite intuitive).

Before graphing caclulators became widely available, the shapes of these graphs were usually learnt by drawing them by hand. Although this can be tedious initially, and sometimes produces less than perfect curves, it is a great learning experience.

Now graphing calculators are wonderful tools, but they are not good teachers. The graphs produced on their tiny screens are also less than perfect, and the true shape of the curves is distorted by the default choice of units along the y-axis.

The graphs on these webpages can be used as posters, and as starting points for the discussion of properties of these functions. The quality of these graphs is comparable to what is produced by computer algebra systems (like Mathematica, Maple, Scientific Notebook, MathCad, ...) but they are computed by JavaScript and displayed as Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). Right-click on the SVG picture to copy it and paste it into a wordprocessor that can handle SVG (e.g. in MSWord 2003 use Edit->Paste Special... and select the bitmap format; the picture will be inserted as SVG).