Here’s a question to all scientists out there: how do you create technical illustrations?
I am a big fan of block diagrams, images and plots. I obviously write my technical documents in TeX, and I love it. However, my documents usually lack the high-quality, sexy images that you see in technical books. I have created diagrams and images using MS Paint, MS PowerPoint, and Adobe Illustrator. However, I am not all that happy with the results. Do you know any graphical editor where one can draw block diagrams and add TeX text to it in a simple, straightforward WYSIWYG manner?
I have heard of MetaPost, MetaGraf and psgraf. Does anyone use them? Any hints?
I generate plots using MATLAB. Thankfully MATLAB allows one to export plots and images in EPS format. I am not totally happy with MATLAB’s plotting capabilities, but I suppose that’s not my biggest problem. I should start using Mathematica and Maple too.
Any suggestions / hints will be warmly welcome.
January 29, 2008 at 21:18 |
I also often wonder what people use for books. For instance diagrams in Needham’s Visual Complex analysis (1,2,3) can’t be easily created with any tools I know of
January 29, 2008 at 22:40 |
Igor Pro from Wavemetrics does a far better job at generating publication quality plots than Matlab. It is more intuitive and does a fair job of annotating images as well. I’ve used it for years to generate plots for publications and presentations, and it has come to the rescue for colleagues frustrated with Matlab’s limited ability to customize plots. It will also export to encapsulated postscript.
January 29, 2008 at 22:49 |
I’ve not made use of it so I can not speak of its performance, but for the Mac there is a slick looking application called OmniGraffle.
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/
January 31, 2008 at 00:10 |
You could give pstricks a try. Or even Graphviz if you’re looking for more specific things such as graphs. For plotting capabilities, I would check out the R-Project too.
January 31, 2008 at 01:16 |
Wow! Graphviz looks awesome. Such sexy graphs! I should have found it long ago :-)
February 3, 2008 at 14:24 |
Yaroslav,
The images in Needham’s book are indeed very sexy. I suppose that book publishers hire technical illustrators to take care of the plots, images and diagrams.
February 3, 2008 at 18:02 |
For diagrams, I often use a free WYSIWYG free SVG editor : inkscape.
For math plots, I’m used to “R”.
cheers
February 3, 2008 at 18:16 |
Pierre,
Thanks for your input! Gonna check inkscape now :-)
February 16, 2008 at 19:02 |
The whole mathematically generated illustration idea appeals to me. I like MetaPost, but I haven’t used it recently. Other than that, I also like Postscript with the PSMath toolkit, but that’s only when there isn’t a need to match fonts with the document. I have the feeling Illustrator can be really powerful if you can get a handle on it, but I haven’t had the time to do so.
December 17, 2008 at 06:13 |
I use metapost extensively. It is great, but limited in its built in tools. A promising new project is “Asymptote” (http://asymptote.sourceforge.net), however I have found its syntax quite difficult to remember and understand.