Surf is a script driven tool to visualize some real algebraic geometry: plane algebraic curves, algebraic surfaces and hyperplane sections of surfaces.

the algorithms should be stable enough not to be confused by curve/surface singularities in codimension greater than one and the degree of the surface or curve. this has been achieved quite a bit. curves of degree up to 30 and surfaces of degree up to 20 have been drawn successfully. however, there are examples of curves/surfaces of lower degree where surf fails to produce perfect images. this happens especially if the equation of the curve/surface is not reduced. best results are achieved using reduced equations. on the other hand, surf displays the fermat-curves accurately for degree up to 98.

surf is free software distributed under the gnu general public license (gpl).

this package provides the manual for the script driven tool surf; it also contains some script samples.