Producing high quality diagrams, flow charts, schematics etc.

Turtwig

Up until now I've just been using paint and the inbuilt tools in Microsoft Office. Is there any LaTeX-ish equivalent for producing high quality smexy diagrams that you guys recommend?

Red Alert

PGF/Tikz without a doubt. There's a small bit of a learning curve but it's well worth it IMHO.

Turtwig

Red Alert wrote: »

PGF/Tikz without a doubt. There's a small bit of a learning curve but it's well worth it IMHO.

Thanks a mil, installing it now.

Turtwig

This is perfect!
If the mods wish they may close the thread, but I know it's barely lived a day yet.:D

Red Alert

Loads of people tend to wonder how to draw diagrams in LaTeX --- I'm only sorry I didn't discover PGF a long time ago!

Clinker

I use PSTricks which is very good, but I'm thinking of changing to TikZ for better compatibility with PDF. The code looks a bit easier than PSTricks too!

Turtwig

It's very very nice stuff. The only problem I have is getting gnuplot to work for it with miktex in windows. I can't seem to get gnuplot.exe recognised. Has anyone experience with this? I'm using TexStudio with Windows Vista SP2.

djpbarry

Clinker wrote: »

I use PSTricks which is very good, but I'm thinking of changing to TikZ for better compatibility with PDF. The code looks a bit easier than PSTricks too!

I used pstricks for a while but got fed up with having to work around the pdflatex incompatibility - pgf tikz is much, much easier. And it's also compatible with beamer, which is handy for doing "animations" for presentations.

Eliot Rosewater

Jernal wrote: »

It's very very nice stuff. The only problem I have is getting gnuplot to work for it with miktex in windows. I can't seem to get gnuplot.exe recognised. Has anyone experience with this? I'm using TexStudio with Windows Vista SP2.

Perhaps this issue is solved, but a few days ago I started using tikz and to get the GnuPlot interaction working I had to compile the LaTeX document with the "-shell-escape" argument - so that pdflatex could call the external program.

Turtwig

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

Perhaps this issue is solved, but a few days ago I started using tikz and to get the GnuPlot interaction working I had to compile the LaTeX document with the "-shell-escape" argument - so that pdflatex could call the external program.

Mind if I ask what Operating System you were using?

Eliot Rosewater

Sorry, yes, Linux/Ubuntu - presumably it's a little different for Windows.

Turtwig

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

Sorry, yes, Linux/Ubuntu - presumably it's a little different for Windows.

Yeah no clue how to do it windows.

I'll still work on it every now and again and if I ever do find the solution to it I'll post it here.
So you guys won't have to worry about this happening.

timbrophy

There is a very nice free app called GeoGebra which can be downloaded from www.geogebra.org It has the advantage that all graphics can be exported as PSTricks or PGF/TikZ. Well worth using.