[texhax] diagrams on Windows

Uwe Lück uwe.lueck at web.de
Fri Feb 27 10:40:12 CET 2009


At 23:20 24.02.09, David Romano wrote:
>A student of mine who is starting out with LaTeX on Windows, is in need of
>a way to produce diagrams. (She writing a paper in 2-dimensional category
>theory, if that helps.)

At 17:26 25.02.09, Niall Mansfield wrote: [...]

What hasn't been named from

     http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/bytopic.html#commutative

is amscd (from AMS-LaTeX) and DCpic. And there is pb-diagram according to

     http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/bytopic.html#diagmisc

(Follow the links to the Catalogue entries there, which lead you to the 
packages themselves. Or use www.ctan.org/pkg/amscd etc.)

Maybe they weren't worth it, I haven't used any of them myself. But if the 
student has just started working with LaTeX, it may be best to try the most 
standard thing first, which may be AMS-LaTeX.

Regards,

   Uwe.

At 17:26 25.02.09, Niall Mansfield wrote:
>It's not clear whether your student wants a procedural drawing
>tool, or a WYSIWYG one; if she's very much a Windows person, it
>may be that she will find WYSIWYG almost essential.
>
>WYSIWYG
>-------
>Here we've used InkScape (also available on *nix) extensively
>over the last few years, and it has served us very well indeed.
>We do all our book covers with it, and use it for all network
>diagrams in our computing books.  For examples see:
>         http://uit.co.uk/altdns
>and in the box on the top right click on
>         inkscape-diagram-examples.pdf
>(Note that the fonts don't show up well on-screen,
>for reasons that are irrelevant here; they print perfectly, which
>is what we made them for.)
>
>Other people use Dia or Scribus.  We haven't used them for anything serious.
>
>Procedural
>----------
>The MetaPost language/tool is very powerful, tho' perhaps complex
>for a new user.  However, it does let you produce multiple diagrams
>that are consistent, and you can make global changes across a whole
>set of diagrams (e.g. in a book).  For examples see:
>         http://uit.co.uk/sustainable
>and in the box on the top right click on
>         sample-metapost-diagrams.pdf
>
>Regards,
>Niall



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