Figures in LaTeX documents (what to use?)

I used affinity not long ago to edit a product label for a local company. It wasn't too hard to get it to do what I wanted but I didn't have to create a new complex diagram from scratch.

Depending on the type of diagram you want there's also Visio which is not officially free but I don't think Microsoft care any more as long as you're not a big business user of many copies.

A lot depends on how complex the diagrams will be and how much you will need to tweak your work while creating them.

E.g., ideally, you want to build a diagram out of "drawing objects" and not just "FLATTENED marks on paper". The former allows you to process those objects even after they have been placed (e.g., to move them, resize them, change color/typeface, etc.) The latter is like using a whiteboard -- tomake a change, you have to carefully erase the old (while not disturbing anything that was drawn over or under it!) and redrawing anew.

Where possible, I like to rely on photographs that I can annotate with callouts, highlights, etc. (easier to get things right!). In the past, when getting photographs wasn't convenient, I would build

If the thing being drawn is a physical device, I like to use CAD as it lets me define relationships between the various parts of the drawing in "real units" instead of eyeballing things (e.g., "this part is

For certain *types* of drawings, you can find tools that are designed with those concerns in mind. E.g., when I am documenting state machines, I need to move things such that connections are maintained (rubber-banding).

For graphs and other content that is mathematically defined, I use tools that will render those relationships *for* me.

Having said these things, I use:

- Adobe Illustrator

- CorelDesigner

- Adobe Photoshop

- Corel PHOTO-PAINT

- gnuplot

- Mathematica

- FontLab (to create "fonts")

- Metashape (SfM)

Note all of these predate cloud hosting. I have no idea what's available in current offerings.

Consider, also, addressing annotations "above" the notion of the illustration (i.e., in the publishing tool). This lets you map the typeface to that used in the rest of the document, better (I've embedded Mathematic charts in publications and the difference in "fonts" stands out noticeably.)

It also lets you scale and translate the drawing without also affecting the annotations that may be *in* the drawing.

Use Word! You can drag-and-drop pics into a document. And export a PDF.

I sometimes draw on paper and scan it. Then I don't have to fight the computer for exactly how I want it drawn.

Yes, we do that, and put pics of whiteboards in docs. But Certain Parties think that stuff that customers should see, should look more grown-up.

I use Visio for some figures. One can also screen cap LT Spice screens, or sheets of a schematic; all our schematics have a sheet 1 block diagram.

Photos of the hardware are good in manuals too.

My guys use some AI thing to tweak photos. Change text, change connector types, remove dust.

Do you want diagrams as 'code' or draw them in a GUI?

For the 'code' approach, TikZ is popular these days. You may find an addon package that draws just the kind of diagram you want, in which case it should be easy to get 'something', and harder to get exactly what you want (just like Latex really). If you have a lot of diagrams of a similar type this might be the way to go, but if you need to hand edit them it can get a bit annoying. eg CircuiTikZ is a package for drawing schematics.

There are tools which let you edit the source code on one side and continually recompile it so you can see the output on the other side - eg this is a web app:

For the 'drawing' approach, I've used Inkscape and have it emit PDFs which you can \includegraphics. It's free and open source. It uses SVG natively and I think some versions of Latex can import SVG, but PDF is less finnicky. It works similarly to Adobe Illustrator and other vector drawing packages.

There's some tools which will emit both a diagram file and a Latex file with the text. These are nice in that the text is in a matching font and size to your body text. I think matplotlib / PGFPlots does that, but that's more for graphs than arbitrary figures. I'm sure I came across a flow for doing that for general drawings, but I can't remember where it was.

Theo

Absolutely, but I think all drawing software now works like that.

Yes, that's what I'm looking for. lpe does that, and I see the inkscape can also do this.

I would like to draw them.

Yes, I see that TikZ has (as I understand it) taken over from PicTeX and PStricks. I have been browsing CTAN and don't recognise 99% of the packages - but it's good that LaTeX is still so popular.

Thanks for the Inkscape pointer, I see that it has a PDF+latex save option, which does exactly what you describe, and is the sort of thing I was after.

There's a short demo of it in this youtube video

Time is money, so I try and use the best tool(s) for the job in hand.

I'm going to give it a try, maybe not for this work, but it does seem to be a no brainer give it a go.