Plotting and Printing Airfoils in Matlab

Gah, got tired of monkeying around with various software (XFLR5 is never provided as an executable on ANY platform despite countless requests, just some packets) so loaded up a profile in Matlab and plotted it in multiple sizes and printed those. Took only a few minutes. It’s still the best software ever.

It went something like this:

load MH78.txt %text file is copy-pasted from MH-aerotools.de
whos %check out if it worked
MH78 %check out what we just loaded

figure
plot(MH78(:,1)/100,MH78(:,2)/100)
grid
axis equal
legend MH78

%perhaps print here if it fits on one paper

%this is three views for a larger print:
xlim([0 0.4])
%print here manually
xlim([0.3 0.7])
%print
xlim([0.6 1])
%print

%Etc you get the idea...

Had to read some documentations for this, but the gist is that Matlab actually has some proper documentation. I just typed help gca, help set, help axis, help axes, help xlim etc and they contained some quick examples that I then tried and got the hang of everything. Matlab should be the gold standard for all similar software developers. I’ve tried coding in Python and Scilab and both have large stumbling blocks in quick and efficient numeric work.