
Tex – Show off your best scientific illustration - anuragramdasan
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/158668/nice-scientific-pictures-show-off
======
susi22
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.marris.org/asymptote/animations/index.html)

[http://www.piprime.fr/developpeur/asymptote/surveys-
asy/frac...](http://www.piprime.fr/developpeur/asymptote/surveys-asy/fractals-
as2d/?posts_per_page=-1) (many more examples)

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

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jdreaver
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.

~~~
cal2
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.

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cal2
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.

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gjm11
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...](http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/17502/what-is-the-correct-
pronunciation-of-tex-and-latex) .

~~~
paulnechifor
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.

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

~~~
paulnechifor
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.

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Argorak
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](http://www.jointjs.com/demos/pn)

~~~
ivan_ah
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...](https://github.com/pyramation/LaTeX2HTML5/blob/master/lib/psgraph.js)
demo here [http://latex2html5.com/](http://latex2html5.com/)

~~~
Argorak
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.

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

~~~
maxerickson
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).

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therobot24
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

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

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neltnerb
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 =(

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ezequiel-garzon
Does anybody know when TikZ/PGF were first released?

~~~
dfc
Earliest entry in the changelog:

    
    
      2003-08-21 Till Tantau <tantau@cs.tu-berlin.de>
    
    	Version 0.30:
    	- Created ChangeLog
    	- Added pgfshade.sty

~~~
ezequiel-garzon
Thanks!

