I'm working on a Smith Chart using TikZ. Currently I'm writing it with everything scaled to a unit circle (centered on 0,0 with a radius of 1) without units. Then scaling so it's a reasonably sized figure.
The problem I'm running into is that when drawing some of the minor grid lines for certain sections, particularly when you're close to the x-axis the radius of the circles i'm drawing becomes much larger than is possible in TikZ.
For example this halts with a Dimension too large
error due to the 1/\x
term for position and radius:
\foreach \x in {0.01, 0.02, ..., 0.2} {
\draw (1, {1/\x}) circle ({1/\x});
}
Image without circles whose radii are too large:
What I'm thinking, is instead of drawing individual circles it would be much easier to draw a polar grid to avoid drawing circles with extremely large radii. However, I haven't been able to find any information about how to do that.
Is there a package or work-around for drawing polar grids?
Best Answer
You could use PGFplots (version 1.5) for this. It can draw polar axes with very flexible customisation possibilities: