Figure Drawing Tools for Latex

Frequently Asked Interrogate List for TeX

Art

Lottery with TeX

There are more packages to ut pictures in (La)TeX itself (rather than importing graphics created externally), ranging from simple purpose of Latex paint picture environment, through enhancements like eepic, to worldly (only tardily) drawing with PicTeX. Depending along your type of drawing, and setup, here are a few systems you may consider:

• The envision environment provides rather primitive drawing capabilities (anything requiring more than linear calculations is excluded, unless a font can come to your help). The environment's ho-hum insistence happening its ain \unitlength, equally the elemental measurement in a diagram, whitethorn be avoided by use of the picture package, which detects whether a length is quoted as a number or as a length, and acts accordingly.
• epic was designed to make use of the Latex paint picture environment somewhat less agonising; eepic extends it, and is capable of using tpic \special commands to improve printing performance. (If the \especials aren't available, the eepicemu will do the business, far less efficiently.
• pict2e; this was advertised in the LaTeX manual, but didn't appear for nearly ten years after publication of the book! It removes all the petty restrictions that surround the use of the icon environment. It consequently suffers only from the sort o eccentric drawing language of the environment, and is a long more useful tool than the original environment has ever been. (Note that pict2e supersedes David Carlisle's stop-gap pspicture.)
• PicTeX is a venerable, and very powerful, system, that draws away placing dots on the page to give the burden of a trace or curve. While this has the electric potential of world power, it is (of course of study) much slower than any of the other established packages. What's more than, in that respect are problems with its corroboration.

• PSTricks gives you entree to the (considerable) power of PostScript via a set of TeX macros, which talk to Addendum using \special commands. Since PostScript is itself a pretty effectual programing language, many another astounding things can in principle represent achieved using PSTricks (a wide range of contributed packages, ranging from world mapping to lens design diagrams, is disposable). Pstricks' \specials are by default particularised to dvips, but on that point is a Pstricks "driver" that allow Pstricks to function low-level XeTeX. pdfTeX users may use pst-pdf, which (corresponding epstopdf — get wind pdfLaTeX graphics) generates PDF files using an auxiliary platform, from PSTricks commands (pst-pdf also requires a Recent installation of the preview package).

  Thither is a PSTricks posting list (pstricks@tug.org) which you English hawthorn bring together, or you may just browse the list archives.

• pgf: patc pstricks is very superhuman and convenient from "traditional" TeX, victimisation information technology with pdfLaTeX is pretty tiresome: if you plainly neediness the written capabilities, pgf, together with its "user-oriented" interface tikz, may be a good bet for you. While PDF has (in marrow) the same written capabilities as PostScript, it isn't programmable; pgf provides LaTeX commands that will utilise the graphical capabilities of both PostScript and PDF equally. Pgf has extensive exact support, which allows it to rival PSTricks' use of the computation engine within PostScript. The pgf manual is large, but a elongate introduction which allows the exploiter to get a spirit for the capabilities of the organization, is available at http://cremeronline.com/Latex paint/minimaltikz.pdf

• MetaPost; you likable MetaFont, but never got to grips with font files? Essay MetaPost — all the ability of MetaFont, but it generates PostScript figures; MetaPost is present part of most serious (La)TeX distributions. Knuth uses information technology for completely his make…

  Eminence that you can "embed" MetaPost source in your document (i.e., livelihood it in-line with your Rubber-base paint code).

• You liked MetaFont (or MetaPost), merely find the language difficult? Mfpic makes up MetaFont operating room MetaPost code for you using familiar-look (La)TeX macros. Non quite the full power of MetaFont or MetaPost, but a friendlier interface, and with MetaPost production the results can be used equally well in either LaTeX or pdfLaTeX.
• You liked PicTeX merely don't have decent memory or time? Look at the late Eitan Gurari's dratex: IT is righteous as powerful, but is an completely red-hot implementation which is non as hard on memory, is much more readable, also as in the author's book "TeX and Latex paint: Drawing and Literate Computer programing", which clay available from on-line booksellers.

In addition, in that respect are several means of generating encode for your graphics application (asymptote, gnuplot and MetaPost, at least) in-furrow in your document, so consume them processed in a command spawned from your (La)TeX run. For details, go steady question.

FAQ Idaho: Q-drawing

Figure Drawing Tools for Latex

Source: https://texfaq.org/FAQ-drawing

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