Adaptive and honest plotting are two techniques to improve the quality of curve and surface visualization packages. Beyond honest plotting, we investigate a number of alternative techniques in order to improve correctness and completeness of 2D and 3D plotting, increase efficiency, and achieve better usability. We refer to these techniques as intelligent plotting as most of them transparently take advantage of the numerical and/or symbolic capabilities available from some mathematical engine in order to provide better and faster graphical dasplays. We implemented these techniques inside two very different packages: the Graphing Calculator and IZIC which we used as testbeds for our experiments.