Matlab-based KETpic add-on for generating and rendering IFS fractals

Abstract

Fractals are among the most exciting and intriguing mathematical objects ever discovered. Although there is a wealth of programs and tools to generate fractals by computer, none of them is able to yield high-quality graphical output to be readily embedded into standard source code in a text-like form. This paper introduces a new and freely available add-on, developed in Matlab, to generate -readable code so that image files are no longer invoked nor required. The resulting files are astonishingly small when compared with their image file counterparts, thus leading to higher compression ratios than other conventional formats such as JPEG, GIF, PNG, EPS and the like. This paper describes our program and gives some examples to illustrate the excellent performance of our approach. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.