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Comment by ecesena | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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:

  $ nano mydoc.md ; pandoc -t latex -S -o mydoc.tex mydoc.md

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 use geogebra's tikz or pstricks export and tweak the figure afterwards.

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.

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...

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