Thanks! Re: Book/Paper technical illustrations - inkscape?

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Wed, Apr 5, 2017 at 8:05 PM, Keith Lofstrom  wrote:
> I am considering Inkscape as a technical illustration

Thanks to Serguei, Andrew, and Ron (and responses arriving
after those) confirming that Inkscape is worth investing
effort in.  I will also become more adept at "make".  
Makefiles support comments like my prior kludgy bash
scripts; without comments, I forget how things work.

My illustrations are mostly mechanical, electrical,
process, etc.  I don't do flowcharts and boxes connected
by arrows, so Dia may not be applicable.  Xfig is a
durable workhorse, but scalable vector graphics (SVG)
helps me move between screen, paper, and animation
environments.  Seemingly, Inkscape can be automated by
scripts, which is handy when I rescale components.

I also use Povray for raytraced 3D; that is pure text
parameterized input, so the "display" is in my head until
it emerges (as a bitmap) on the screen.  I make PNGs and
flash animations from that; I should learn to make SVG
and HTML5 animations instead.

I dive down into libgd from time to time, to make detailed
animated pixel plots that Gnuplot can't make, for example
  http://server-sky.com/gsr02link
Being able to make SVG/HTML5 animations like that from
enormous data files and supported standard tools would
be nice.

Gnuplot of course.  It does SVG now, time to make that
transition, too.  

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom  kei...@keithl.com

Re: Book/Paper technical illustrations - inkscape?

[Ron Tapia]

Hi,

I'd like topoint out an often overlooked tool, graphviz (dot):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphviz

It's included in SL:

graphviz.x86_64

It is specifically for generating figures from graphs (lattices) specified 
in a very simple language (dot).


It's not a general purpose tool, but it can save a lot of time if you find 
yourself generating a lot of figures involving graphs/lattices.


Cheers,

Ron

PS - Someone mentioned using make for documents. I use make/git for my 
documents as well. It's nice to be able to edit a dot file, type "make", 
and have the graphics as well as the document rebuilt. Keeping documents 
in a git repository with all of the history is incredibly useful.


--
Goodhart's Law: A metric used to regulate an activity ceases to be a useful 
metric.

On Thu, 6 Apr 2017, Andrew C Aitchison wrote:


Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2017 07:57:31 +0100
From: Andrew C Aitchison <and...@aitchison.me.uk>
To: kei...@keithl.com
Cc: scientific-linux-us...@listserv.fnal.gov
Subject: Re: Book/Paper technical illustrations - inkscape?

On Wed, 5 Apr 2017, Keith Lofstrom wrote:


 I am considering Inkscape as a technical illustration
 tool for latex documents (papers and book chapters).
 Suggestions for better tools?


Inkscape would be my first choice, but I'd also consider
xfig(included in SL6; for SL7 you may need to get it from epel)
dia www.gnome.org/projects/dia
Zirkel / CaR (Compass and ruler)
 http://car.rene-grothmann.de/

One interesting feature of dia is that it can be used
to generate sql schema.


--
Andrew C Aitchison  Cambridge, UK

Re: Book/Paper technical illustrations - inkscape?

[Andrew C Aitchison]

On Wed, 5 Apr 2017, Keith Lofstrom wrote:


I am considering Inkscape as a technical illustration
tool for latex documents (papers and book chapters).
Suggestions for better tools?


Inkscape would be my first choice, but I'd also consider
xfig(included in SL6; for SL7 you may need to get it from epel)
dia www.gnome.org/projects/dia
Zirkel / CaR (Compass and ruler)
http://car.rene-grothmann.de/

One interesting feature of dia is that it can be used
to generate sql schema.


--
Andrew C Aitchison  Cambridge, UK

Re: Book/Paper technical illustrations - inkscape?

[Serguei Mokhov]

On Wed, Apr 5, 2017 at 8:05 PM, Keith Lofstrom  wrote:
> I am considering Inkscape as a technical illustration
> tool for latex documents (papers and book chapters).
> Suggestions for better tools?
>
> I usually set up bash scripts (with lots of comments)
> to automate the assembly of my documents, rather than
> use graphic environments like openoffice. I am NOT
> looking for a complete document design tool.
>
> I have Inkscape running now in SL7.3, though it has
> a strange rendering problem (overlaid windows leave
> translucent ghosts) that I'll need to fix if I want
> to use it for production.

I used LaTeX and Inkscape for most of my drawings in my doctorate
dissertation. Though I did not use much of the built-in LaTeX
integration within Inkscape itself, for my documents I exported
drawings as .png or .pdf for better quality and used them as figure
environments. Inkscape is a good portable tool for such things. I used
a Makefile for automation and building of my thesis instead of bash
scripts to assemble the PDF.

-- 
Serguei Mokhov
http://www.cs.concordia.ca/~mokhov
http://cciff.ca | http://mdreams-stage.com
http://marf.sf.net | http://sf.net/projects/marf