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LaTeX TikZ for Cryptographers

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Re: LaTeX TikZ for Cryptographers

#4

Post by btown »

TikZ (and all the abstractions you can build on it) is one of my favorite parts of the LaTeX ecosystem. At its core is a layout engine where you describe how nodes and lines are laid out relative to others, and it spaces everything for you. https://github.com/jluttine/tikz-bayesnet , for instance, is a lightweight wrapper that lets you represent graphical models with code like:

    \node[latent, left=of y, yshift=0.5cm] (mu) {$\mu$} ;
Now that I'm no longer in academia, I've lost my muscle memory for the syntax, but every time I need to build a flowchart, I think back on this with fondness. If someone were to repackage this with a cloud-based IDE and autocomplete (maybe using something like https://latexbase.com/ ), maybe slightly kinder syntax, I could see it meeting a business need even for non-technical users who are fed up with the difficulty of "fitting something in" in a large PowerPoint flowchart.

There's also http://sketch4latex.sourceforge.net/ for 3D drawing, which is equally cool.

Re: LaTeX TikZ for Cryptographers

#7

Post by blt »

TikZ is a microcosm of LaTeX itself: powerful, expressive, able to automate repetitive tasks, beautiful output -- but sometimes, it takes forever to do something that would take a few mouse clicks in a GUI tool.

Re: LaTeX TikZ for Cryptographers

#9

Post by kashyapc »

blt wrote: post #7

TikZ is a microcosm of LaTeX itself: powerful, expressive, able to automate repetitive tasks, beautiful output -- but sometimes, it takes forever to do something that would take a few mouse clicks in a GUI tool.

I completely hear you. Despite my extremely limited skills with TikZ, My brain "somehow" stubbornly insists to keep chugging along with TikZ, spending unreasonable amounts of time. But I love the end result; the way text and diagrams meld so cleanly. Nothing comes close.

On the unreasonable amount of time spent: Last December, "merely" to get the arrows right neatly arranged, I spent more than 2 hours :-(. See the transition from: wonky-arrows1.png --> wonky-arrows2.png --> much-better-arrows3.png --> even-better-arrows4.png (the "final") here[1].

In two months I have another deadline to produce some technical material with TikZ diagrams (that's my choice, though). I'm determined to become more efficient at it.

[1] https://kashyapc.fedorapeople.org/temp/tikz/

Re: LaTeX TikZ for Cryptographers

#10

Post by blt »

kashyapc wrote: post #9
blt wrote: post #7

TikZ is a microcosm of LaTeX itself: powerful, expressive, able to automate repetitive tasks, beautiful output -- but sometimes, it takes forever to do something that would take a few mouse clicks in a GUI tool.

I completely hear you. Despite my extremely limited skills with TikZ, My brain "somehow" stubbornly insists to keep chugging along with TikZ, spending unreasonable amounts of time. But I love the end result; the way text and diagrams meld so cleanly. Nothing comes close. On the unreasonable amount of time spent: Last December, "merely" to get the arrows right neatly arranged, I spent more than 2 hours :-(. See the tr…

Yeah, I keep using it in the hope that I will slowly memorize it, and one day I will be able to use it effectively without constantly reading docs. This approach worked for LaTeX itself, and vim...
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