Live data from Hacker News

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

tikz.dev

41–50 of 88 posts

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

#41
post #40

"TikZ ist kein Zeichenprogramm" (German for "TikZ is not a drawing program"). :-)

An explanation for the name from the TikZ docs:

> TikZ’s name is intended to warn people that TikZ is not a program that you can use to draw graphics with your mouse or tablet. Rather, it is more like a “graphics language”.

While making the app I was worried that I was going against the TikZ philosophy. Maybe I should have named it "TikZ ist doch ein Zeichenprogramm" (TideZ)..

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

#42
post #38

I'm running Linux Mint (xfce version), and I installed the .deb version (TikZ.Editor_0.4.0_amd64.deb). It's very odd...for example, when I open it or do File/New, many (but not all) of the grid cells are rectangles, not squares. Am I doing something wrong, like installing the wrong version? Or maybe misinterpreting what the faint grey lines are?

Yeah that's odd, the grid should be square. Is the web version looking correct in the browser? Feel free to paste some screenshots into https://github.com/DominikPeters/tikz-editor/issues and I can look into it.

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

#44
Ah, I love CircuitiTikZ. Only way to do simple text-based circuit diagrams.

https://ctan.org/pkg/circuitikz?lang=en

https://github.com/circuitikz/circuitikz

Some years ago I wired it up with `asciidoctor-diagram` so we could have simple circuits in our Asciidoc maintenance manuals. The techs loved the hell out of it, and we could collaborate on the things in a git versioned ecosystem vs whatever fresh hell the PDM/ERP had for us.

A very nice complement to the already awesome WireViz (https://github.com/wireviz/WireViz)

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

#45

Are you open to people repurposing this app as a plugin to larger apps like obsidian?

Generally yes! It is permissively licensed. I originally considered writing this app as a VS Code extension (because most app ideas that include a source editor are more simply done as an extension) but then decided that I wanted to have more control over the source view.

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

#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?

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

#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 at `(0.5,2.91)` like it's happening in my test. Then features such as "align bottom" for a selection of multiple nodes should are manipulating the absolute coordinates instead of using TikZ's alignment features (anchors etc.).

I understand generating such code is more difficult. Maybe it can be something to point at for the next version, who knows...

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

#49

This is very cool, but I'm going to say the inevitable... How hard would it be to support cetz? I'm not touching LaTeX if I can avoid it, but I'm using Typst all the time.

Probably quite doable with a coding agent.

There is a full wysiwyg (vibe-coded) presentation software based on typst available which partially implements exactly that:

https://codeberg.org/presenst/presenst

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

#50

Are you open to people repurposing this app as a plugin to larger apps like obsidian?

Generally yes! It is permissively licensed. I originally considered writing this app as a VS Code extension (because most app ideas that include a source editor are more simply done as an extension) but then decided that I wanted to have more control over the source view.

Perfect! I've been working on a general purpose Swiss army knife for technical note taking/ knowledge management/ sharing. This could very well be an add-on missing piece for heavier latex rendering and editing. Thank you!
Post reply on HN