The Grumpy Editor's guide to diagram editors [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's guide to diagram editors

Posted May 4, 2004 20:57 UTC (Tue) by parimi (guest, #5773)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to diagram editors

I used Xfig for doing all the diagrams for my report and I was impressed by it. It takes a while to figure out keyboard shortcuts etc. The quality of postscript images generated by Xfig was very good too (when compared to M$ tools like MS Word, Visio or Paint). I think Xfig is ideal for quick diagrams and fits well with latex for generating and inserting images into documents. Never used the other tools mentioned in this article though! Also, worthy of mention is sketch - a vector drawing program written in python. I was surprised that I couldnt find the homepage for sketch - not sure if it is still being developed or has been taken over by skencil?

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The Grumpy Editor's guide to diagram editors

Posted May 4, 2004 23:36 UTC (Tue) by komarek (guest, #7295) [Link]

Here here! Xfig produces excellent quality output if one chooses the proper formats and fonts. Because all of my publications use LaTeX (I'm an academic), I really appreciate the variety of TeX-related output formats and fonts. Besides the obvious Encapsulated PostScript output, there are several varieties of native LaTeX formats that are human readable and editable.

-Paul Komarek

Skencil Webpage

Posted May 5, 2004 15:39 UTC (Wed) by ber (subscriber, #2142) [Link]

Skencil is the new name of Bernhard Herzog's Sketch. Check out: www.skencil.org. On regular intervals Skencil scores high on comparions in German computer magazines. The 0.6.x series is very stable and mature.

Heve you checked "ipe"?

Posted May 6, 2004 8:30 UTC (Thu) by ToNo (subscriber, #8039) [Link]

When making diagrams for LaTeX I have found ipe to do a very good job.

"Ipe is a drawing editor for creating figures in PDF or (encapsulated) Postscript format. It supports making small figures for inclusion into LaTeX-documents as well as making multi-page PDF presentations that can be shown on-line with Acrobat Reader."

Some of the Ipe's main features (according to the author) are:

Entry of text as LaTeX source code. This makes it easy to enter mathematical expressions, and to reuse the LaTeX-macros of the main document. In the display text is displayed as it will appear in the figure.
Produces pure Postscript/PDF, including the text. Ipe converts the LaTeX-source to PDF or Postscript when the file is saved.
It is easy to align objects with respect to each other (for instance, to place a point on the intersection of two lines, or to draw a circle through three given points) using various snapping modes.
Users can provide Ipelets (Ipe plug-ins) to add functionality to Ipe. This way, Ipe can be extended for each task at hand.
The text model is based on Unicode, and has been tested with Korean, Chinese, and Japanese.
The UI is implemented using the portable toolkit QT, and so can be compiled for Unix, Windows, and Mac OS X.

I especially find the quality and control of the output better than in other free tools. In addition is the file format (XML embedded into the EPS or PDF file) very neat, "the output is the source".

Heve you checked "ipe"?

Posted May 13, 2004 13:01 UTC (Thu) by mcmt88 (guest, #13309) [Link]

I second the "ipe" recommendation. It's great. It has very sophisticated (almost CAD-like) snapping capabilities.

It can also import PDF files, so it's good for annotating R/matlab/octave graphs.

There's a window's version in addition to the standard unix versions (QT toolkit).