"I just need a quick conceptual diagram for my paper." ...10 hours elapse.
I love that TikZ lets you embed graphics right in your document without external dependencies on PDF figures, but I've never been able to build anything non-trivial without quite a lot of effort.
If the OmniGraffle people are listening, I've been buying your product every release since I think about 2003 or 2004. I would love to see clean, approximate TiKZ export (where possible with simple geometries) with janky, verbose PGF as a fallback option when an exact complicated reproduction is required.
I agree that the learning curve for tikz and latex is greater than word. However I think it is disingenious to say that tikz and latex are no different when it comes to the initial and/or MWE learning curve. In my opinion tikz's learning curve is steeper. For starters there is no tikz equivalent of:
Pandoc drastically reduces the initial learning curve for latex and beamer.
That being said tikz was one of the packages I thought was noticeably absent from the nine listed packages. The other package that I would add was fontspec, in fact I was shocked to see microtype and not see fontspec mentioned next.
That's a fair assessment. I drank the LaTeX koolaid >15 years ago when I didn't even have a clearly compelling reason to do so. Now back in school working on a PhD, and wondering why anyone wouldn't use it. How quickly we forget our learning pains.
Dia has an option to flawlessly export output as LaTeX PGF macros and TeX PSTricks macros--I LOVE those two features. In the past, I've also used LaTeX Draw.
Agreed. TikZ is simply an awesome tool. If people want to try it out, I found A Very Minimal Introduction to TikZ by Jacques Crémer a great resource to help get started. There are also some handy examples here: http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/
The manual is amazing too. Especially good is the author's sense of humor and the design primer in chapter 7. For anybody wanting to get started I would recommend taking a look at the tutorials.
For anyone that is staring at "VII: Utilities" and wondering where the design primer is, I think the above comment is referring to "Part I: Tutorials and Guidelines, Section 7: Guidelines on Graphics." The section begins on page 91 of the linked document.
+1 for tikZ. I graphically present information using R plots and R's tikzDevice package enables me to export output to native TeX. I NEED tikZ to include external R TeX exports. When it comes to vector graphics, Dia is my friend and I export output as LaTeX PGF macros...
Comments
Since "top 10" is better than "top 9", I'd add TikZ. Ok, you need it only if you need to draw pictures, but it's an incredible tool.
"I just need a quick conceptual diagram for my paper." ...10 hours elapse.
I love that TikZ lets you embed graphics right in your document without external dependencies on PDF figures, but I've never been able to build anything non-trivial without quite a lot of effort.
If the OmniGraffle people are listening, I've been buying your product every release since I think about 2003 or 2004. I would love to see clean, approximate TiKZ export (where possible with simple geometries) with janky, verbose PGF as a fallback option when an exact complicated reproduction is required.
"I just need a quick 1 page report of my work." ...10 hours elapse using LaTeX rather than word. :)
TikZ is not different that LaTeX in general. It has a hard learning curve, but you gain long term on reuse, structure, versioning.
Also slides in Beamer are a mess at the beginning, but maintaining/sharing/co-working... I personally think it's way easier than with ppt.
I agree that the learning curve for tikz and latex is greater than word. However I think it is disingenious to say that tikz and latex are no different when it comes to the initial and/or MWE learning curve. In my opinion tikz's learning curve is steeper. For starters there is no tikz equivalent of:
Pandoc drastically reduces the initial learning curve for latex and beamer.That being said tikz was one of the packages I thought was noticeably absent from the nine listed packages. The other package that I would add was fontspec, in fact I was shocked to see microtype and not see fontspec mentioned next.
That's a fair assessment. I drank the LaTeX koolaid >15 years ago when I didn't even have a clearly compelling reason to do so. Now back in school working on a PhD, and wondering why anyone wouldn't use it. How quickly we forget our learning pains.
You can use latex as mostly a markup language. Put in your default header and write your document with sections and so on.
I usually try to not worry about fine-tuning at all until the document is done, otherwise the whole point of latex is lost to me.
I seem to remember inskcape has a pstricks export. Searching on google also turns up this for svg to tikz conversion:
https://github.com/kjellmf/svg2tikz
Dia has an option to flawlessly export output as LaTeX PGF macros and TeX PSTricks macros--I LOVE those two features. In the past, I've also used LaTeX Draw.
I use geogebra's tikz or pstricks export and tweak the figure afterwards.
Agreed. TikZ is simply an awesome tool. If people want to try it out, I found A Very Minimal Introduction to TikZ by Jacques Crémer a great resource to help get started. There are also some handy examples here: http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/
EDIT: Forgot link to Crémer's guide: http://cremeronline.com/LaTeX/minimaltikz.pdf
The manual is amazing too. Especially good is the author's sense of humor and the design primer in chapter 7. For anybody wanting to get started I would recommend taking a look at the tutorials.
http://mirrors.ctan.org/graphics/pgf/base/doc/pgfmanual.pdf
For anyone that is staring at "VII: Utilities" and wondering where the design primer is, I think the above comment is referring to "Part I: Tutorials and Guidelines, Section 7: Guidelines on Graphics." The section begins on page 91 of the linked document.
+1 for tikZ. I graphically present information using R plots and R's tikzDevice package enables me to export output to native TeX. I NEED tikZ to include external R TeX exports. When it comes to vector graphics, Dia is my friend and I export output as LaTeX PGF macros...