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)<p>Of course, if you're already a TikZ pro then just stick with that.<p>To give you a taste:<p><a href="http://www.marris.org/asymptote/animations/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.marris.org/asymptote/animations/index.html</a><p><a href="http://www.piprime.fr/developpeur/asymptote/surveys-asy/fractals-as2d/?posts_per_page=-1" rel="nofollow">http://www.piprime.fr/developpeur/asymptote/surveys-asy/frac...</a> (many more examples)<p>[1] <a href="http://asymptote.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://asymptote.sourceforge.net/</a>
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 :)<p>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 <i>outline</i> and <i>plan</i> 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.
TeX and TikZ were my saving grace in college. I really don't know where I'd be without it.<p>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!<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>I realize TeX isn't for everyone, but you should seriously look into it if you think you can benefit from it.<p>TeX has saved me days, if not weeks, such that I can focus on more important stuff rather than struggling with Word.
Please, could someone who can fix up titles correct the capitalization? Not "Tex" but "TeX".<p>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 <a href="http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/17502/what-is-the-correct-pronunciation-of-tex-and-latex" rel="nofollow">http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/17502/what-is-the-cor...</a> .
Quick side-question:<p>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.<p>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):<p>ndb2.c{right}..{curl0}dk.c cutafter BpathBox(dk);<p>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 :).<p>I found jointjs[1] and kind of like it, but is there anything else?<p><a href="http://www.jointjs.com/demos/pn" rel="nofollow">http://www.jointjs.com/demos/pn</a>
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
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 =(