Heve you checked "ipe"?

Heve you checked "ipe"?

Posted May 6, 2004 8:30 UTC (Thu) by ToNo (subscriber, #8039)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's guide to diagram editors by parimi
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to diagram editors

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".

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