Drawing with TeX
There are many packages to do pictures in (La)TeX itself (rather than
importing graphics created externally), ranging from simple use of
LaTeX picture environment, through enhancements like
eepic, to
sophisticated (but slow) drawing with PicTeX. Depending on your type
of drawing, and setup, here are a few systems you may consider:
- The
picture environment provides rather primitive
drawing capabilities (anything requiring more than linear
calculations is excluded, unless a font can come to your help). The
environment’s tedious insistence on its own \unitlength, as the
basic measurement in a diagram, may be avoided by use of the
picture package, which detects whether a length is quoted
as a number or as a length, and acts accordingly.
- epic was designed to make use of the LaTeX
picture environment somewhat less agonising;
eepic extends it, and is capable of using tpic
\special commands to improve printing performance. (If the
\specials aren’t available, the eepicemu will do the
business, far less efficiently.
- pict2e; this was advertised in
the LaTeX manual, but didn’t appear for nearly
ten years after publication of the book! It removes all the petty
restrictions that surround the use of the
picture
environment. It therefore suffers only from the rather
eccentric drawing language of the environment, and is a far more
useful tool than the original environment has ever been. (Note that
pict2e supersedes David Carlisle’s stop-gap
pspicture.)
- PicTeX is a venerable, and very powerful, system, that draws
by placing dots on the page to give the effect of a line or curve. While
this has the potential of great power, it is (of course) much slower
than any of the other established packages. What’s more, there
are problems with its documentation.
- PSTricks gives you access to the (considerable) power of
PostScript via a set of TeX macros, which talk to PostScript using
\special commands. Since PostScript is itself a
pretty powerful programming language, many astounding things can in
principle be achieved using PSTricks (a wide range of
contributed packages, ranging from world mapping to lens design
diagrams, is available).
Pstricks’ \specials are
by default specific to dvips, but there is
a Pstricks ‘driver’ that allow Pstricks to
operate under XeTeX. PDFTeX users may use pst-pdf,
which (like epstopdf — see
PDFLaTeX graphics) generates
PDF files using an auxiliary program, from PSTricks
commands (pst-pdf also requires a recent installation of
the preview package).
There is a PSTricks mailing list
(pstricks@tug.org) which you may
join, or you may
just browse the
list archives.
- pgf: while pstricks is very powerful and
convenient from ‘traditional’ TeX, using it with PDFLaTeX is
pretty tiresome: if you
simply want the graphical capabilities, pgf, together with
its “user-oriented” interface tikz, may be a good
bet for you. While PDF has (in essence) the same graphical
capabilities as PostScript, it isn’t programmable; pgf provides
LaTeX commands that will utilise the graphical capabilities of
both PostScript and PDF equally. Pgf has extensive
mathematical support, which allows it to rival PSTricks’
use of the computation engine within PostScript.
The pgf manual is enormous, but a simple introduction which
allows the user to get a feel for the capabilities of the system, is
available at http://cremeronline.com/LaTeX/minimaltikz.pdf
- MetaPost; you liked MetaFont, but never got to grips with font files?
Try MetaPost —
all the power of MetaFont, but it generates PostScript figures; MetaPost
is nowadays part of most serious (La)TeX distributions. Knuth
uses it for all his work…
Note that you can
“embed” MetaPost source in your document (i.e.,
keep it in-line with your LaTeX code).
- You liked MetaFont (or MetaPost), but find the language difficult?
Mfpic makes up MetaFont or MetaPost code for you using
familiar-looking (La)TeX macros. Not quite the full power
of MetaFont or MetaPost, but a friendlier interface, and with MetaPost output
the results can be used equally well in either LaTeX or PDFLaTeX.
- You liked PicTeX but don’t have enough memory or time? Look
at the late Eitan Gurari’s dratex: it is just as powerful,
but is an entirely new implementation which is not as hard on
memory, is much more readable and is (admittedly sparsely) documented at
http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/ gurari/tpf/html/README.html,
as well as in the author’s book “TeX and LATeX: Drawing and
Literate Programming”, which remains available from on-line
booksellers.
In addition, there are several means of generating code for your
graphics application (asymptote, gnuplot and
MetaPost, at least) in-line in your document, and then have them
processed in a command spawned from your (La)TeX run. For details,
see question.
- dratex.sty
- dratex
- epic.sty
- epic
- eepic.sty
- eepic
- eepicemu.sty
- eepic
- mfpic
- mfpic
- preview.sty
- preview
- pspicture.sty
- pspicture
- pst-pdf.sty
- pst-pdf
- pgf.sty
- pgf
- pict2e.sty
- pict2e
- pictex.sty
- pictex
- picture.sty
- Distributed as part of oberdiek
- pstricks
- pstricks
- tikz.sty
- Distributed as part of pgf
This answer last edited: 2012-10-19
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=drawing