Comment by gignico | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gignico | Hacker News Reader

I've tried it now a little. The UI looks very cool, and generally the project is cool so congrats!

However, the generated TikZ code is not good in my opinion. Everything uses absolute coordinates, which in TikZ is seldom needed.

Just to start, if I place a single node I get absolute coordinates for it. Why? If you just write `\node {Hello};`, TikZ will put that at the center of the bounding box. No need to tell it's at `(0.5,2.91)` like it's happening in my test. Then features such as "align bottom" for a selection of multiple nodes should are manipulating the absolute coordinates instead of using TikZ's alignment features (anchors etc.).

I understand generating such code is more difficult. Maybe it can be something to point at for the next version, who knows...

Thanks, this is good feedback. I think the difficulty lies not so much in code generation, but determining what a user would expect. If I click the "align bottom" button, I would be surprised if

  \begin{tikzpicture}
    \draw (0,2) rectangle (1,1);
    \draw (1.5,2) rectangle (2.5,1);
  \end{tikzpicture}

suddenly were to get a new randomly named \coordinate and relative coordinate notation. On the other hand, if you start out with "nice" code, the app will in many cases refuse to let you drag things since it doesn't know (and in many cases can't know) what the drag should mean (do you change the named coordinate or change the offset to the coordinate etc).

Elsewhere in this discussion, we talked about positioning like "right of", and some good suggestions were made (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48647683).

That's true for two `rectangle` paths, but for two nodes that's what I would expect as a user. Anyway, not an easy problem for sure.

A follow-up comment: when dragging, you could perhaps offer a 'sticky' mode (toggle/enable with Shift/Alt/Ctrl key?) that locks nodes to TikZ's default alignment features, and display a tooltip with the anchor position in question. Contrary to most drawing apps, this could be the default mode, and the toggle key could switch to absolute, freeform positioning.

Feel like could reference how those CAD script languages do it.

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