Patrick's Blog

Will spend Easter and the week thereafter in the Bay area and come back to Switzerland through San Diego and Las Vegas, where I will also spend some time.

I really like books with great illustrations (great here means that the font should be the same as in the text etc, probably the best example of such a book is the “The Art of Computer Programming” by D. Knuth). I thus hardly ever felt happy with drawing things in a vector graphics program and always chose to program/typeset the graphics in some sort of programming language. In the past years I’ve played around with different packages/programs for doing this; the list includes:

• Matlab. I like it a lot for prototyping, but the plots usually look crappy. Same is true for the open source alternative octave.
• Gnuplot. Very powerful but the standard outputs usually look really bad.
• PSTricks. Some very impressive examples, but sucks when used in combination with PDF.
• PyX. From the website: “PyX is a Python package for the creation of PostScript and PDF files.” While I liked the Python environment and the power it gives you, it lead to problems when I wanted to include the plots in presentations: the fonts don’t agree or it’s harder to draw edges to other elements on the slides. It just lacked the integration with LaTeX. Note: it’s possible to work around some of the issues like for example the font problem, but usually it feels quite hacky.
• PGF/TikZ. As it’s from the same author who wrote the excellent Beamer package for presentations it integrates nicely with LaTeX and Beamer. It’s supposed to work with both DVI/PS and PDF. They recently released version 2 and by looking and the documentation you can immediately realize the sheer power this package has, especially for drawing general illustrations. It became my tool of choice about a year ago for drawing graphical models and such like, I however didn’t like the plot environment so much (it’s hardly existing at all).

This weekend I then finally played around with the Gnuplot TikZ terminal which addresses my last issue with PGF/TikZ: plotting functions and data. With this tool you can use gnuplot to create the actual plotting scripts and also to create the illustrations. However, instead of producing for example a PDF, the terminal outputs a .tex file that can then be included in the LaTeX document. The actual drawing in the document is then done by PGF/TikZ. The results look truly awesome. The installation is still a little bit messy as it needs the yet unreleased gnuplot 4.3 CVS.