Tex – Show off your best scientific illustration
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Tex – Show off your best scientific illustration
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: Tex – Show off your best scientific illustration
#2so 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
Re: Tex – Show off your best scientific illustration
#3I made a great one showing how Schwarz-Christoffel mappings worked. Wonder if I can dig it up somewhere...
Re: Tex – Show off your best scientific illustration
#4I 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 :)
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 outline and plan 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.
Re: Tex – Show off your best scientific illustration
#5TeX and TikZ were my saving grace in college. I really don't know where I'd be without it.
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!
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.
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.
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).
I realize TeX isn't for everyone, but you should seriously look into it if you think you can benefit from it.
TeX has saved me days, if not weeks, such that I can focus on more important stuff rather than struggling with Word.
Re: Tex – Show off your best scientific illustration
#6I 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 :) The Tikz manual is very well written, and the author, Till Tantau, includes a section…
I agree with you.
At first, I would use TikZ anywhere and everywhere I could just because it was so novel to me.
I've found that TeX's and TikZ's novelty can fade pretty quickly, but their usefulness when used appropriately only grows with time. They are, however, very situational tools.
> I sat down and read most of the manual in one sitting...
Dear God, man, are you sane!? I'm joking. :)
But sometimes I would just look at the manual in my spare time because it really is that beautiful.
Re: Tex – Show off your best scientific illustration
#7So can anyone discuss the benefits of doing something like this in Tex versus using a program like say Inkscape and using EPS? [Serious]
Re: Tex – Show off your best scientific illustration
#8Quick side-question:
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.
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):
ndb2.c{right}..{curl0}dk.c cutafter BpathBox(dk);
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 :).
I found jointjs[1] and kind of like it, but is there anything else?
Re: Tex – Show off your best scientific illustration
#9So can anyone discuss the benefits of doing something like this in Tex versus using a program like say Inkscape and using EPS? [Serious]
Some of it is undoubtedly yak shaving, where it is more fun to write the drawing code than to click the mouse hundreds of times.
A real advantage is that a prototype will be a 'living figure', where changing a couple of values can completely shift the figure (which enables cheap experimenting with how different parameters look or whatever).
Re: Tex – Show off your best scientific illustration
#10Quick side-question: 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. 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): ndb2.c{right}..{curl0}dk.c cutafter BpathBox(dk); Mo…
Dan Lynch ported some of pstricks to js[1], which you might be interested in checking out. Don't know if you can do intersections and cuts though...
[1] https://github.com/pyramation/LaTeX2HTML5/blob/master/lib/ps... demo here http://latex2html5.com/