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Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX

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Re: Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX

#51

Post by DominikPeters »

wjholden wrote: post #47

Oh man, good on you identifying a product that needs to exist. I've used a few TikZ editors (both online and desktop) and none of them are just amazing. But, I've taken my papers to Typst. Could you have the agent do the same thing for Cetz, the TikZ equivalent for Typst?

I don't use Typst myself and am not familiar with Cetz. From the docs it looks like it's in early stages of development, so it doesn't feel like the right time to do this to me (or at least should be a separate, perhaps forked, app). But certainly it would make sense to develop bidirectional converters that could in particular be used at file open and file save in this app.

Re: Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX

#53

Post by DominikPeters »

gignico wrote: post #48

I've tried it now a little. The UI looks very cool, and generally the project is cool so congrats! However, the generated TikZ code is not good in my opinion. Everything uses absolute coordinates, which in TikZ is seldom needed. Just to start, if I place a single node I get absolute coordinates for it. Why? If you just write `\node {Hello};`, TikZ will put that at the center of the bounding box. No need to tell it's…

Thanks, this is good feedback. I think the difficulty lies not so much in code generation, but determining what a user would expect. If I click the "align bottom" button, I would be surprised if

  \begin{tikzpicture}
    \draw (0,2) rectangle (1,1);
    \draw (1.5,2) rectangle (2.5,1);
  \end{tikzpicture}
suddenly were to get a new randomly named \coordinate and relative coordinate notation. On the other hand, if you start out with "nice" code, the app will in many cases refuse to let you drag things since it doesn't know (and in many cases can't know) what the drag should mean (do you change the named coordinate or change the offset to the coordinate etc).

Elsewhere in this discussion, we talked about positioning like "right of", and some good suggestions were made (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48647683).

Re: Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX

#54

Post by gignico »

DominikPeters wrote: post #53
gignico wrote: post #48

I've tried it now a little. The UI looks very cool, and generally the project is cool so congrats! However, the generated TikZ code is not good in my opinion. Everything uses absolute coordinates, which in TikZ is seldom needed. Just to start, if I place a single node I get absolute coordinates for it. Why? If you just write `\node {Hello};`, TikZ will put that at the center of the bounding box. No need to tell it's…

Thanks, this is good feedback. I think the difficulty lies not so much in code generation, but determining what a user would expect. If I click the "align bottom" button, I would be surprised if \begin{tikzpicture} \draw (0,2) rectangle (1,1); \draw (1.5,2) rectangle (2.5,1); \end{tikzpicture} suddenly were to get a new randomly named \coordinate and relative coordinate notation. On the other hand, if you start out w…

That's true for two `rectangle` paths, but for two nodes that's what I would expect as a user. Anyway, not an easy problem for sure.

Re: Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX

#55

Post by asdewqqwer »

gignico wrote: post #48

I've tried it now a little. The UI looks very cool, and generally the project is cool so congrats! However, the generated TikZ code is not good in my opinion. Everything uses absolute coordinates, which in TikZ is seldom needed. Just to start, if I place a single node I get absolute coordinates for it. Why? If you just write `\node {Hello};`, TikZ will put that at the center of the bounding box. No need to tell it's…

Feel like could reference how those CAD script languages do it.

Re: Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX

#57

Post by tombert »

This is cool!

I know people like it, but I hate writing TikZ manually, to the point that I've mostly moved most of my technical-ish drawings to draw.io/diagrams.net, and then just export to a PNG. I feel like it's inelegant, but it works well enough and it's easy to make something that looks ok. Generally I'm all for text-defined stuff.

I have moved some of my stuff to Mermaid when I know my stuff is going to live in Markdown but I've not tried to get that working in TeX.

That said, I would like to use TikZ just because it's kind of the idiomatic way of doing diagrams in LaTeX, so a WYSIWYG might be useful.

One suggestion, I would like the arrows to be able to "attach" to the boxes, as in the arrow endpoints can move when you move the boxes. That's how draw.io does it.

Re: Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX

#58

Post by tombert »

wjholden wrote: post #47

Oh man, good on you identifying a product that needs to exist. I've used a few TikZ editors (both online and desktop) and none of them are just amazing. But, I've taken my papers to Typst. Could you have the agent do the same thing for Cetz, the TikZ equivalent for Typst?

Tangential, but how has the publishing process been for Typst?

I'm looking to write a paper on a recent project, but most of the places I've seen to submit has asked for TeX. I greatly prefer Typst because of the ridiculously fast compilation times but I haven't used it for anything outside of school assignments do to that restriction.

Re: Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX

#59

Post by DominikPeters »

tombert wrote: post #57

This is cool! I know people like it, but I hate writing TikZ manually, to the point that I've mostly moved most of my technical-ish drawings to draw.io/diagrams.net, and then just export to a PNG. I feel like it's inelegant, but it works well enough and it's easy to make something that looks ok. Generally I'm all for text-defined stuff. I have moved some of my stuff to Mermaid when I know my stuff is going to live in…

Attachment works for (text) nodes because they have anchors - you should see green attachment dots when drawing new lines or moving existing lines.

When using draw.io I’d suggest exporting to PDF instead of PNG so you keep it as vector graphics.

Re: Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX

#60

Post by sureglymop »

tombert wrote: post #57

This is cool! I know people like it, but I hate writing TikZ manually, to the point that I've mostly moved most of my technical-ish drawings to draw.io/diagrams.net, and then just export to a PNG. I feel like it's inelegant, but it works well enough and it's easy to make something that looks ok. Generally I'm all for text-defined stuff. I have moved some of my stuff to Mermaid when I know my stuff is going to live in…

Can't you save a drawio file as .drawio.svg?

I've done diagrams with it a few times and just used Computer Modern to make the diagrams look the same as the text. Good enough.

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