Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I draw figures for my mathematical lecture notes using Inkscape (2019)

castel.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 79 posts

Re: I draw figures for my mathematical lecture notes using Inkscape (2019)

#61

Post by beanjuice »

rg111 wrote: post #55
baby wrote: post #7

When I started writing papers I was really bullish on tikz. I thought that professional looking papers should have figures that were precise to the mm. But the time it takes to get something useful is just insane. I quickly moved to the vectorial drawing tool I had handy: keynote. It’s really not made for that, but it has enough features that you can quickly use it to do pretty things. I ended up using keynote to do…

> I quickly moved to the vectorial drawing tool I had handy: keynote. It’s really not made for that [...] You would be surprised at how many figures are drawn with PowerPoint on papers at top Machine Learning conferences.

I would say a large proportion of top chemical/materials science papers are also drawn in only powerpoint (besides data, where origin>matlab>excel).

Re: I draw figures for my mathematical lecture notes using Inkscape (2019)

#62

Post by geokon »

Gualdrapo wrote: post #4

This should have a (2019) in the title. If I'm not wrong, somewhere between 2019 and now Inkscape 1.0 was released. And now the betas have numerous new features and UI changes, most notably the introduction of multiple pages in a single document. Besides, framing Inkscape as a "free — but arguably less featureful — alternative to Adobe Illustrator. You can use it for designing flyers and logos ~~like in the picture b…

But have any of the issues the article addresses been smoothed out?

The guy basically built a whole macro layer to make inkscape less clunky

Re: I draw figures for my mathematical lecture notes using Inkscape (2019)

#63

Post by kashyapc »

baby wrote: post #7

When I started writing papers I was really bullish on tikz. I thought that professional looking papers should have figures that were precise to the mm. But the time it takes to get something useful is just insane. I quickly moved to the vectorial drawing tool I had handy: keynote. It’s really not made for that, but it has enough features that you can quickly use it to do pretty things. I ended up using keynote to do…

Nice work! On using tikz for vector graphics, I use it mostly for technical presentations. I'm terribly slow and abysmal at writing tikz code, but still I was hell-bent on using it—just because of the clean and smooth melding of text and diagrams. I should really look at other tools to save time. I can't justify spending so much time mucking around with tikz anymore.

Re: I draw figures for my mathematical lecture notes using Inkscape (2019)

#65

Post by IshKebab »

procedurecall wrote: post #41

With all the discussion here about alternative programs to make vector graphics for mathematical figures, I'm a little surprised no one has mentioned Ipe ( https://ipe.otfried.org/ ), given it's far and away the most popular tool in my field (and has good native support for LaTeX expressions). It certainly doesn't have all the features that Inkscape supports (although it does have quite a lot of features), but the fe…

Agreed. IPE is far far superior to Inkscape for mathematical diagrams. Honestly Inkscape is rather painful to use just for arty stuff. Using it for precise diagrams with maths labels sounds downright masochistic.

Re: I draw figures for my mathematical lecture notes using Inkscape (2019)

#66

Post by baby »

baby wrote: post #7

When I started writing papers I was really bullish on tikz. I thought that professional looking papers should have figures that were precise to the mm. But the time it takes to get something useful is just insane. I quickly moved to the vectorial drawing tool I had handy: keynote. It’s really not made for that, but it has enough features that you can quickly use it to do pretty things. I ended up using keynote to do…

Oh and I forgot, I have some of my tikz here: https://www.iacr.org/authors/tikz/

Re: I draw figures for my mathematical lecture notes using Inkscape (2019)

#67

Post by majewsky »

adhesive_wombat wrote: post #23

Call me cheugy, but there is absolutely no way that I'd be able to use any computer graphics tool effectively during a lecture to draw diagrammatic notes of any substantial complexity, and pay attention to the lecture at the same time.

Depends on how well you know the tool. I wrote my lecture notes for Graph Theory in LaTeX+TikZ, but it only went well because I had been doing TikZ drawings frequently for about 2 years by that point, and also the course was introductory level, so the drawings were rather simple.

For most other courses, we had a process involving at least two people, wherein one person would take notes in LaTeX with placeholders where the images need to go, and one person would take notes by hand, including images. Then we would produce the drawings either via TikZ or via Inkscape afterwards. This could be streamlined into one person doing LaTeX notes with placeholders, who also drew the images on paper to later insert them into the digital version.

Re: I draw figures for my mathematical lecture notes using Inkscape (2019)

#68

Post by mhh__ »

ramraj07 wrote: post #50
mhh__ wrote: post #48

One of my pet theories/takes is that if any billionaire wants to make science more productive they need to fund a modern replacement of LaTeX and really streamline flows for things like this. TikZ in particular but latex in general has awful compile times in part because of it's ancient design.

Lol a simpler latex is so far down my list of what needs to be fixed in science it’s comical as a suggestion. Here are three options for you: 1. Use latex as is, if this is your bread and butter the initial setup and learning curve is a few weeks. 2. Use overleaf. And please don’t start on “I’ll never submit my data to a cloud” no billionaire is going to not take your data. 3. Use word and let your assistant digitize…

I think it does slow down progress enough to be worth considering because it's clunky but more importantly because it's ancient so there is almost no ability to extract metadata or properly target anything other than print as a first class target. In teaching for example I think a book of basically just symbols is dated, we should be trying richer ways to display textbooks (e.g. beyond mere hypertext), using information either annotated or extracted from the source.

This isn't about figures but rather making it more productive to use in general, and making its use more semantically analysable, and more deterministic: If you include data in a paper is it actually up to date? Does that expression actually solve the equation etc. These are all things you could check automatically.

There are obviously bigger problems in science but what are you gonna do about them? It's nearly all political either in the department's or in government, whereas a new LaTeX is a relatively direct thing that can be done with a small team and a lot of money.

Re: I draw figures for my mathematical lecture notes using Inkscape (2019)

#69

Post by jofer »

uneekname wrote: post #33
jofer wrote: post #5

Inkscape is great for technical figures, especially cartoons like the examples shown here. At least in my field, purely conceptual futures are called "cartoons" to distinguish from "figures" which are based on observational data. A former advisor of mine had a quote that I'll happily steal here: "A cartoon is the highest form of scientific communication". Distilling a concept down to a very simple illustration is an…

I saw in your profile that you’re a geologist, and as a geology major about to finish my undergrad I’m particularly interested in how you’ve used Inkscape to create scientific cartoons. I’ve been using Inkscape to complete assignments for my classes, and it’s been an uphill (yet rewarding!) battle. It seems that my professors and peers each have a different program of choice, so I decided to forge my own way with OSS…

I've used it for figures, posters, etc for many years. For the most part, no one cares too much about what you use, more about the final figure. If you're working so closely with someone that you're sharing raw files (e.g. they're using illustrator and want you to share a .ai file), you're going to hit issues, certainly.

However, most work will focus on the end result -- i.e. a paper with static exported figures.

At any rate, there's nothing wrong with the proprietary tools either -- they're great. It's just a matter of what you can get access to and what's best for the use case at hand.

If it helps to have some examples, pretty much every figure in my dissertation was made with a combination of matplotlib, QGIS, and Inkscape: http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/YHJWFVKMNVZGN8S E.g. see fig 2.12 for a cartoon made purely in Inkscape and things like fig 2.4 or 2.6 are a combination of matplotlib and Inkscape.

Re: I draw figures for my mathematical lecture notes using Inkscape (2019)

#70

Post by mhh__ »

sicp-enjoyer wrote: post #51
mhh__ wrote: post #48

One of my pet theories/takes is that if any billionaire wants to make science more productive they need to fund a modern replacement of LaTeX and really streamline flows for things like this. TikZ in particular but latex in general has awful compile times in part because of it's ancient design.

> modern replacement of LaTeX It's one of the most reliable and useful pieces of software, and it seems to be doing just fine. Most efforts at modernization focus on extension, either with packages, other languages, GUIs, etc. > latex in general has awful compile times in part because of it's ancient design. I would expect the "ancient" to mean it's faster, as it was designed for a more restricted resource environmen…

By that logic C and C++ should compile really fast because of the preprocessor. It's possible to do a really fast preprocessor so obviously the overall system is fast, surely!?
Post reply on HN