A Saunders graphic is a plot of the th base- digits of a function as a function of and .

The plots above show Saunders graphics for the functions , , , and in base for digits to 3.

Similarly, the plots above show Saunders graphics for the same functions in base for digits and 2.

Saunders' original paper (Saunders 1972) considered slightly more general operations. Unfortunately, it is also rather difficult to read. Since the paper was written before the advent of fast computers and high-resolution displays, it plotted the resulting patterns as a matrix of printed characters. Saunders' original term for this sort of plot was therefore "character map."