Tex – Show off your best scientific illustration | Hacker News Reader

Tex – Show off your best scientific illustration

tex.stackexchange.com

159 pointsanuragramdasan22 comments

For those who want to create similar looking (in quality) graphics: Check out asymptote [1] (IMO one of the most undervalued software in the TeX community). It has a pretty nice programming language only made for drawing. It's got types, structs, modules etc and is a real joy to program. It's also very quick to compile which allows for very quick feedback loop (almost "live" editing with a keybinding on vim/emacs)

Of course, if you're already a TikZ pro then just stick with that.

To give you a taste:

http://www.marris.org/asymptote/animations/index.html

http://www.piprime.fr/developpeur/asymptote/surveys-asy/frac... (many more examples)

[1] http://asymptote.sourceforge.net/

I remember when I first learned about Tikz. I sat down and read most of the manual in one sitting (this is NOT a great way to learn anything, in my opinion), and I used Tikz everywhere. I would make a powerpoint using LaTeX/beamer simply so I could make some cool animations. I am not quite so excited to use it everywhere nowadays :)

The Tikz manual is very well written, and the author, Till Tantau, includes a section on general tips for creating graphics. He rightly states that graphics should be first-class citizens of papers and presentations. He also says that you should outline and plan your graphics before you jump straight to writing Tikz code. I wish I followed that advice more a few years ago. Tikz is beautiful, but I find nothing holds a candle to planning a graphic than pencil and paper.

I agree with you.

At first, I would use TikZ anywhere and everywhere I could just because it was so novel to me.

I've found that TeX's and TikZ's novelty can fade pretty quickly, but their usefulness when used appropriately only grows with time. They are, however, very situational tools.

> I sat down and read most of the manual in one sitting...

Dear God, man, are you sane!? I'm joking. :)

But sometimes I would just look at the manual in my spare time because it really is that beautiful.

This is just for 2.10, I bet they broke the 1k mark for 3.0:

  dfc@ronin:texmf-dist/doc/generic/pgf$ pdfinfo pgfmanual.pdf |grep Pages
  Pages:          726

TeX and TikZ were my saving grace in college. I really don't know where I'd be without it.

Seeing your code work is great, but seeing the results of my TeX and TikZ code personally provides me with an additional level of gratification. It's awesome!

My friends would spend several (painful) hours in Word trying to format our (bio)chemistry lab reports perfectly to the professor's/TA's specifications.

I would just punch in my numbers into a text file, run it through a LuaTeX template I wrote, and would end up with a perfectly formatted lab report.

Now, I work in R&D for an IVD company and employ the same logic for my notebook studies (which require lot #s, expiration dates, asset #s, locations, etc).

I realize TeX isn't for everyone, but you should seriously look into it if you think you can benefit from it.

TeX has saved me days, if not weeks, such that I can focus on more important stuff rather than struggling with Word.

Please, could someone who can fix up titles correct the capitalization? Not "Tex" but "TeX".

Strictly, the letters are tau-epsilon-chi. And, as Knuth puts it, "when you say it correctly to your computer, the terminal may become slightly moist". (Like the "ch" in "loch".) See, e.g., the currently-highest-rated answer at http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/17502/what-is-the-cor... .

Tex is the name, TeX is the author's preferred stylization in non-TeX environments (and the most used).

Fix is not the best term since it's not broken. You can't force someone to adopt your stylization.

TeX is the name, just like 'xkcd' is the name (not Xkcd or XKCD).

You misunderstand names.

If you want to be pedantic, TeX comes from τέχνη, yet I notice you didn't use Greek letters ΤΕΧ but the Latin letters TEX. Notice they are not the same, but look the same. You also didn't subscript the E.

xkcd is pronounced XKCD, so why not write it as such? See how it forces you to begin sentences with lowercase letters. (By the way, in CSS you would use text-transform and not actually write the lowercase letters since that's just the presentation.)

Do you also thing Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116 (pronounced [ˈalbɪn]) is a real name?

Names are a very complicated things and expecting people to follow every author's sylization is pretentious.

> And, as Knuth puts it, "when you say it correctly to your computer, the terminal may become slightly moist". (Like the "ch" in "loch".)

I understand that LaTeX is a pre-internet piece of software, and thus it may not have been apparent that it's popularity would spread more through written than spoken word, but I still find this kind of thing pretentious (or at least a little silly).

If I named a popular piece of software "Kyei" after the Burmese word for "world", I feel like it would be kind of silly to get angry when english speakers didn't pronounce it "Chai" (The correct pronunciation).

Quick side-question:

I know metapost and tikz rather well and am searching for a JS library that does similar things using SVG, especially when it comes to path drawing.

Example: draw a curved path from the center of item A to the center of item B, but cut off at the bounding box of B and put an arrow head there. In metapost, thats easy (after grokking the syntax):

ndb2.c{right}..{curl0}dk.c cutafter BpathBox(dk);

Most JS libraries (including D3 and Raphael) make this pretty hard, as they rarely deal with shapes and intersections (beyond masking and clipping). D3 for example is awesome for graphs, but not if you want to put something on intersections with them :).

I found jointjs[1] and kind of like it, but is there anything else?

http://www.jointjs.com/demos/pn

Dan Lynch ported some of pstricks to js[1], which you might be interested in checking out. Don't know if you can do intersections and cuts though...

[1] https://github.com/pyramation/LaTeX2HTML5/blob/master/lib/ps... demo here http://latex2html5.com/

Hm, that is a nice start indeed, but as far as I can tell, intersections and cuts are not in :(. pstricks I forgot, I know that as well.

I am not that attached to the syntax, just the possibilities and some of the vocabulary.

So can anyone discuss the benefits of doing something like this in Tex versus using a program like say Inkscape and using EPS? [Serious]

Some of it is undoubtedly yak shaving, where it is more fun to write the drawing code than to click the mouse hundreds of times.

A real advantage is that a prototype will be a 'living figure', where changing a couple of values can completely shift the figure (which enables cheap experimenting with how different parameters look or whatever).

If you have any text labels in the diagram, the font will be consistent with the rest of the text.

so jealous, a great tikz figure is like art - one thing that isn't emphasized enough to grad students is that good figures can make it so much easier to understand the concepts and results being presented

I made a great one showing how Schwarz-Christoffel mappings worked. Wonder if I can dig it up somewhere...

Aww, I was hoping to show off the coolest graphics I ever made doing some seriously intense data analysis on TEM images in MATLAB... but TeX only. Oh well =(

Does anybody know when TikZ/PGF were first released?

Earliest entry in the changelog:

  2003-08-21 Till Tantau <tantau@cs.tu-berlin.de>

	Version 0.30:
	- Created ChangeLog
	- Added pgfshade.sty

Thanks!

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