7 ms·

I draw figures for my mathematical lecture notes using Inkscape (2019)

312 points by marcodiego 5y ago

amichail 5y ago
Check out the drawing mode in TeXmacs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baF3kpx_JSo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baF3kpx_JSo
the-mitr 5y ago
I use a variety of options depending on the complexity of the illustration. I use tikz for very simple figures, while geogebra for mathematical ones with tikz/pgf export. I use Inkscape to render drawings which have more elements and are complex with latex output included.
mNovak 5y ago
These look excellent. On the other hand, I still make an embarrassing amount of technical figures using powerpoint built in shapes.
- bbkane 5y ago
  Try https://excalidraw.com/ https://excalidraw.com/ - it's SUPER NICE for these simple "shape" diagrams.
  - mNovak 5y ago
    It is a very nice looking tool, but I can't live without ellipse arcs. The bezier elbow lines always look so cheap to me.
  - orlp 5y ago
    I wish there was something as polished and easy to use as excalidraw that wasn't as minimalistic in its features.
    - quickthrower2 5y ago
      I like the minimalist featureset. I end up making the sketch, not shaving the yak. Yes a rectangle makes a perfectly good text input, and also a mobile phone screen. It's a versatile shape!
  - amelius 5y ago
    Question: how do you add a label to an arrow (such that it stays on the arrow if you move it)?
    - emi2k01 5y ago
      You can select the label and the arrow and press control+G to create a group. You can also do the opposite, pin the arrow to the label so that if the label moves the arrow follows: double click the arrow to see the path points, select an end point and move it on top of the label until you see the bounding box of the label.
      - amelius 5y ago
        I tried it but it only semi-worked. The label moves with the arrow, but if I move one side of the arrow (by moving the box it is attached to) the label does not move. (Note: I want the label on the arrow, not on its endpoints).
- bzxcvbn 5y ago
  If it works, it works.
  - amelius 5y ago
    Until it doesn't and you have to redo your entire drawing in another tool ... It is always better to choose a tool where you're least likely to run into a dead-end street.
    - bzxcvbn 5y ago
      If you know in advance that you're not going to need a more powerful, more complicated/expensive/... tool, then it's okay and even recommended to use the "lesser" tool. If I need to screw in a few screws, am I better off buying a small screwdriver or a professional 18V screwdriver/drill combo with 24 add-ons? Who knows, it depends on my projects and my skills, but it's entirely possible that buying the $5 screwdriver is the appropriate thing to do.
      - amelius 5y ago
        That's a bad example because you can always switch to the powertool if needed without building your project from scratch.
Gualdrapo 5y ago
This should have a (2019) in the title. If I'm not wrong, somewhere between 2019 and now Inkscape 1.0 was released. And now the betas have numerous new features and UI changes, most notably the introduction of multiple pages in a single document. Besides, framing Inkscape as a "free — but arguably less featureful — alternative to Adobe Illustrator. You can use it for designing flyers and logos ~~like in the picture below~~, but it’s also a powerful tool for drawing mathematical figures" seems poor and rather unfair to it. Its compliance to the SVG standard makes it the best tool to produce scalable graphics for the web and it's extensively used to develop icon systems and theming in multiple FOSS software.
- dang 5y ago
  Year added above. Thanks!
- akeck 5y ago
  Heh. I must have missed the introduction of the multiple pages feature. I used to hand-write math homework in Inkscape with a Wacom tablet. I found it unusually effective, but the single page limit always made longer problems a bit unwieldy. (Note: I could never get my head around doing problem sets directly in LaTeX, although I did mostly OK using it for proofs in my analysis classes.)
- flobosg 5y ago
  Multiple pages? Finally! I started making slide presentations in Inkscape, and the option of exporting to multi-page PDFs will come in handy! More info: https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php?title=Release_notes/1.2#Page_tool https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php?title=Release_notes...
- geokon 5y ago
  But have any of the issues the article addresses been smoothed out? The guy basically built a whole macro layer to make inkscape less clunky
  - syntheweave 5y ago
    The UI is getting fixed up in piecemeal fashion, gradually moving around elements or consolidating them. If you want to see the full details, the devs stream and record video showing progress and reviewing major new versions. Specific to this article, the alignment tools have recently gotten a pass of updates - something which everyone doing technical drawings can make use of. Layers and objects have been merged into one panel and the update performance of the panel uses a more scalable algorithm now, making it easier to navigate the document in outline form and reducing some of the burdens of object manipulation that the author calls out to external code for. Styling still needs improvement but IIRC there is work in progress on swatches that might address that. It's now possible to use a command bar to type in commands (as is the trend with every complex app) which addresses some of the use of macros. Shortcut binding is in need a pass to improve assignability; that would eliminate a second source of pain.
jofer 5y ago
Inkscape is great for technical figures, especially cartoons like the examples shown here. At least in my field, purely conceptual futures are called "cartoons" to distinguish from "figures" which are based on observational data. A former advisor of mine had a quote that I'll happily steal here: "A cartoon is the highest form of scientific communication". Distilling a concept down to a very simple illustration is an underappreciated artform. Inkscape is really great for scientific cartoons. I've used illustrator for many years, as well, and it's more powerful, but lacks something for quick bare-bones sketches compared to inkscape. There are things that illustrator is far better suited for, but these sort of conceptual sketches are kind of a sweet spot for inkscape.
- uneekname 5y ago
  I saw in your profile that you’re a geologist, and as a geology major about to finish my undergrad I’m particularly interested in how you’ve used Inkscape to create scientific cartoons. I’ve been using Inkscape to complete assignments for my classes, and it’s been an uphill (yet rewarding!) battle. It seems that my professors and peers each have a different program of choice, so I decided to forge my own way with OSS. My contact info can be found in my profile if you prefer.
  - jofer 5y ago
    I've used it for figures, posters, etc for many years. For the most part, no one cares too much about what you use, more about the final figure. If you're working so closely with someone that you're sharing raw files (e.g. they're using illustrator and want you to share a .ai file), you're going to hit issues, certainly. However, most work will focus on the end result -- i.e. a paper with static exported figures. At any rate, there's nothing wrong with the proprietary tools either -- they're great. It's just a matter of what you can get access to and what's best for the use case at hand. If it helps to have some examples, pretty much every figure in my dissertation was made with a combination of matplotlib, QGIS, and Inkscape: http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/YHJWFVKMNVZGN8S http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/YHJWFVKMNVZGN8S E.g. see fig 2.12 for a cartoon made purely in Inkscape and things like fig 2.4 or 2.6 are a combination of matplotlib and Inkscape.
baby 5y ago
When I started writing papers I was really bullish on tikz. I thought that professional looking papers should have figures that were precise to the mm. But the time it takes to get something useful is just insane. I quickly moved to the vectorial drawing tool I had handy: keynote. It’s really not made for that, but it has enough features that you can quickly use it to do pretty things. I ended up using keynote to do all the figures in Real-World Cryptography https://www.amazon.com/dp/1617296716/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_GAKDNA2H5BBJVHC50DR3 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1617296716/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_GA... You can see some example in this thread: https://twitter.com/cryptodavidw/status/1436368473395925000?s=21&t=9Z1R538TO1oEx36pLkvWcg https://twitter.com/cryptodavidw/status/1436368473395925000?...
- iratewizard 5y ago
  I personally use Adobe XD for almost everything vector. It's not the job it's made for, but it's way faster to work in and is easier to organize. No need to switch between lucidcharts, illustrator and XD when everything I need is in one place.
- andrei_says_ 5y ago
  Went through the Twitter thread and these look really great. Clear, understandable, just enough detail and context. Congratulations on creating this book and putting it out into the world.
- rg111 5y ago
  > I quickly moved to the vectorial drawing tool I had handy: keynote. It’s really not made for that [...] You would be surprised at how many figures are drawn with PowerPoint on papers at top Machine Learning conferences.
  - beanjuice 5y ago
    I would say a large proportion of top chemical/materials science papers are also drawn in only powerpoint (besides data, where origin>matlab>excel).
- kashyapc 5y ago
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
I love inkskape, but I wish it took some interface tips from modern graphical software like Sketch. Inkscape's interface hasn't changed much in the last 15 years or more, and since then a LOT has changed in the UX world. Tools like Sketch and Figma introduced so many tiny interface and usability improvements, that when combined with each other they raise productivity be a factor of 10 or more for tasks like drawing a vector icon.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  I remember I tried to use Inkscape for a logo once and was so frustrated I ended up just writing the SVG in to jsfiddle because I couldn’t work out how in Inkscape.
- amelius 5y ago
  What I'd like to see is a constraint solver, where e.g. you can fix distances, angles, projections, etc. Also missing is Path->Calligraphic stroke conversion, arguably the most important tool for cartoon drawing.
  - delusional 5y ago
    Having experimented a bit in the space i think constraint solvers are actually a little overhyped for 2d drawing. I find just being able to do math and rendering the drawing from text to be enough.
    - amelius 5y ago
      Ok. How about a way to enter LaTeX expressions in-place?
      - jedbrown 5y ago
        TexText (Re-editable LaTeX graphics for Inkscape) is a neat plugin. https://textext.github.io/textext/index.html https://textext.github.io/textext/index.html
- 5y ago
klyrs 5y ago
I am thoroughly ashamed that I have overlooked the option to render text through latex for all these years.
Waterluvian 5y ago
Can someone recommend me an Ubuntu friendly application that’s one step up from MS Paint? I find Inkscape and GIMP far too heavy and tedious for my needs: I work remote and just want to doodle on a screenshot.
- wrp 4y ago
  > Ubuntu friendly application that’s one step up from MS Paint mtPaint -- For Windows and Linux, and very stable. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtPaint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtPaint)
- schaefer 5y ago
  You might try Krita.
- hyakosm 5y ago
  KolourPaint is a better alternative to MS Paint with pretty much the same UI.
- bzxcvbn 5y ago
  If you're actually using Windows (you mention MS paint), there's built-in functionality to doodle on screenshots. It's built on the same tech as e.g. onenote so it's surprisingly good. Just press win+shift+s. For an existing photo/screenshot, just open it with the default image viewer and click modify. And the "pro-tip", if I may: when you take a screenshot, it gets copied in your clipboard. Try pasting it somewhere. It works in an astouding number of places.
- cturtle 5y ago
  Try flameshot. It’s a screenshot tool that has a builtin mini editor with arrows, lines, drawing, etc. very basic but still useful for marking up a screenshot.
- _emacsomancer_ 5y ago
  As mentioned below, there's Krita, which is very drawing oriented. Maybe also Xournal++ - I use it for drawing on/annotating documents on video calls.
nonrandomstring 5y ago
Of several FOSS tools I regularly use for technical diagrams Inkscape has the best balance of olskool accurate features and modern "designy" type stuff. XFig is my old friend, and I love its inbuilt library of 1970's style clip art, icons, and technical symbols. But XFig feels clunky now. Dia is a useful quick tool for drawing boxes and sticks. But Inkscape has the overall balance right. Light enough to draw a quick diagram, featured enough to design a book cover or complex layered diagram. One feature I love is scanning/tracing bitmaps to layered SVG objects that can be broken apart, simplified and remixed. I noticed when using Openshot video editor under Linux recently that it integrates seamlessly with Inkscape and Blender for designing animated titles.
blip54321 5y ago
This looks awesome. I'd pay $50 to have this workflow fully integrated and working with my editor (emacs; I'd also take VSCode or something else that's not vim). apt-get install a few things, and it works. That's conveying value-add, not suggesting someone should do it for that amount (which is to say I'd gladly pay, but I can't imagine it's worth doing for that amount, or that there's a reasonably way to find and collect $$$ from more people like me).
- karthink 5y ago
  Emacs integration for the OP's style of inkscape usage[1] My fork with personalizations[2] Org-mode integration for Krita[3] and Xournal[4] [1] https://github.com/foxfriday/ink https://github.com/foxfriday/ink [2] https://github.com/karthink/ink https://github.com/karthink/ink [3] https://github.com/lepisma/org-krita https://github.com/lepisma/org-krita [4] https://gitlab.com/vherrmann/org-xournalpp https://gitlab.com/vherrmann/org-xournalpp
  - blip54321 5y ago
    Thank you!
adhesive_wombat 5y ago
Call me cheugy, but there is absolutely no way that I'd be able to use any computer graphics tool effectively during a lecture to draw diagrammatic notes of any substantial complexity, and pay attention to the lecture at the same time.
- majewsky 5y ago
  Depends on how well you know the tool. I wrote my lecture notes for Graph Theory in LaTeX+TikZ, but it only went well because I had been doing TikZ drawings frequently for about 2 years by that point, and also the course was introductory level, so the drawings were rather simple. For most other courses, we had a process involving at least two people, wherein one person would take notes in LaTeX with placeholders where the images need to go, and one person would take notes by hand, including images. Then we would produce the drawings either via TikZ or via Inkscape afterwards. This could be streamlined into one person doing LaTeX notes with placeholders, who also drew the images on paper to later insert them into the digital version.
henshao 5y ago
This seems like the right thread to ask. I love the idea of tools like these to be able to easily and programmatically draw diagrams, but eventually it gets thrown into a powerpoint, where then it is locked behind some tool and arcane DSL that only I know. So when my boss who doesn't care about the tools inevitable wants to move the arrow up an inch or make the box green instead of blue, I have to go back to do it. Meaning I give up on using these tools so I don't end up a fulltime diagram engineer. Anyone know of a tool that is close to inkscape/graphviz, but has an "export back to powerpoint" feature?
- zelphirkalt 5y ago
  If the boss wants to "move arrows up" then it is possible, that the boss should have been involved in the design process, or keep feedback for later to be worked in, but not in the middle of a presentation. And please ... Don't do software modelling in powerpoints. It is quite painful to watch that happening. It lowers interest in contributing of people, who would have used a proper tool for such a job and would have been 3x faster that way.
umutisik 5y ago
I use a program called Latexdraw that gives the best of both worlds. You can draw with the GUI and get pstricks code and use latex expressions and math fonts. (Free, author accepts donations) http://latexdraw.sourceforge.net/ http://latexdraw.sourceforge.net/
procedurecall 5y ago
With all the discussion here about alternative programs to make vector graphics for mathematical figures, I'm a little surprised no one has mentioned Ipe (https://ipe.otfried.org/ https://ipe.otfried.org/), given it's far and away the most popular tool in my field (and has good native support for LaTeX expressions). It certainly doesn't have all the features that Inkscape supports (although it does have quite a lot of features), but the features it does have are implemented with a heavy emphasis on ease-of-use. It's sometimes easier to brainstorm within the program than on paper. It's also plenty easy to add useful plugins in Lua: At one point I coded a plugin to check if a diagram of a graph contained a Hamiltonian cycle (by calling an external C++ program I wrote that used simple backtracking). I was able to very quickly experiment with which of my small graphs and modifications to said graphs ended up having Hamiltonian cycles, and was able to narrow down some useful features to think about.
- bmitc 5y ago
  What is your field? As someone who likes the idea of and quality of images that TikZ produces but not how obtuse it is, I've done a fair amount of research into this space at times. However, I've never heard of Ipe. Even if I had, I'm not sure I'd use it. The material is basically devoid of examples. How does one learn how to use it?
  - procedurecall 5y ago
    I work mostly on computational geometry and graph algorithms, and some related things (although I certainly don't have a very long list of publications). Ipe is written entirely by one person (Otfried Cheong), who works on a lot of computational geometry, which is likely part of why it's most well-known among this group. I've used Ipe for every diagram in every paper I've ever published, and I used them for all the figures in the slides of a course I taught a couple years ago. Clearly I'm a bit biased, but having used TikZ a small but painful number of times during my undergraduate degree, I'd be more than happy if I never have to work with it again. Like everyone else I know, I learned Ipe through trial and error, with a handful of little tidbits of advice. 90% of the functionality you will use is quite intuitive and right there on the interface if you hover over things (and all the tools also have keyboard shortcuts of course). Some of the tips I've given/been given over the years that are less intuitive are: - You can save directly in PDF and re-edit a PDF saved with Ipe. This is very helpful for a LaTeX project, since PDF files are very easy to import (even ones with multiple pages). - When you import into a LaTeX project, the dimensions of the figure will be cropped to the dimensions of the actual content (this may be obvious to some, but it wasn't to me). - You can edit the alignment of text (and other various hidden options) by right clicking on objects in select mode. - The different snapping modes are probably the killer feature of Ipe. You can snap to the intersection of curves, to the vertices of polylines, and much more. Between the intersection snapping mode, circle tool, and line segment tool, you can technically perform any compass-ruler construction you want from Euclidean geometry (with has been useful a handful of times for me surprisingly). - Selection of objects is a bit funny (but often useful): If you select from top-left to bottom-right, then you will only select things your selection box fully encapsulates. If you select instead from bottom-right to top-left, you will select anything your selection box intersects. - Writing extensions and editing configs (incl changing page dimensions, colour palette, text size palette) is unfortunately quite painful, and I can only recommend digging through the examples. I believe there is documentation somewhere, but I found it less than helpful. - You can edit the underlying points of any curve you place after the fact by using the "edit" option in the right-click menu. - In order to use the regular k-gon "ipelet" (under ipelets->goodies IIRC), you need to have a circle present first (which you can of course delete afterwards). Ipelets are the mechanism by which you can program functionality with Lua, and this is probably the one I use the most (it comes built in with the program). In my personal opinion, the only major weak point of Ipe is how annoying it is to rotate things (to the point where I often prefer to redraw things in rotated form, unless it's quite complex). To do this you need to very carefully select a pivot point type and a rotation type through the right-click menu. You also have to be very conscious of snapping as you perform the rotation.
newrotik 5y ago
Have had to do lots of technical / latex-y drawings in the past as academic, and found Ipe [0] to be incredibly useful. It is very minimalistic and easy to use. The images produced are simple to embed in latex documents, and they fit the style/font of the rest of the document. I think this tool should be a lot more popular than it is. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipe_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipe_(software) -- using the wikipedia link since the official site doesn't have many screenshots
mhh__ 5y ago
One of my pet theories/takes is that if any billionaire wants to make science more productive they need to fund a modern replacement of LaTeX and really streamline flows for things like this. TikZ in particular but latex in general has awful compile times in part because of it's ancient design.
- ramraj07 5y ago
  Lol a simpler latex is so far down my list of what needs to be fixed in science it’s comical as a suggestion. Here are three options for you: 1. Use latex as is, if this is your bread and butter the initial setup and learning curve is a few weeks. 2. Use overleaf. And please don’t start on “I’ll never submit my data to a cloud” no billionaire is going to not take your data. 3. Use word and let your assistant digitize your diagrams. Point is the tool to make figures is not what’s slowing down good science. It’s the heads that do it that are a problem
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    I think it does slow down progress enough to be worth considering because it's clunky but more importantly because it's ancient so there is almost no ability to extract metadata or properly target anything other than print as a first class target. In teaching for example I think a book of basically just symbols is dated, we should be trying richer ways to display textbooks (e.g. beyond mere hypertext), using information either annotated or extracted from the source. This isn't about figures but rather making it more productive to use in general, and making its use more semantically analysable, and more deterministic: If you include data in a paper is it actually up to date? Does that expression actually solve the equation etc. These are all things you could check automatically. There are obviously bigger problems in science but what are you gonna do about them? It's nearly all political either in the department's or in government, whereas a new LaTeX is a relatively direct thing that can be done with a small team and a lot of money.
- sicp-enjoyer 5y ago
  > modern replacement of LaTeX It's one of the most reliable and useful pieces of software, and it seems to be doing just fine. Most efforts at modernization focus on extension, either with packages, other languages, GUIs, etc. > latex in general has awful compile times in part because of it's ancient design. I would expect the "ancient" to mean it's faster, as it was designed for a more restricted resource environment, and Knuth tailors optimal algorithms for each task. For example, the single-pass is ergonomically a pain, because you often have to run it multiple times to get the final output but it also makes it faster. Do you have ideas about alternative architectures that would improve performance?
msravi 5y ago
I use Geogebra to draw, and then export as PGF/TikZ. You can then edit the code to fine-tune or make any modifications. Works very well. The advantage is that you can also include plots in the figures along with SVG. Not sure if Inkscape allows that.
jzer0cool 5y ago
Curious about the right side of terminal, there is a white screen. Is this integrated into the terminal, or is this a different window?
s1291 5y ago
OP shared the link without even reading it!
joeberon 5y ago

312 points by marcodiego 5y ago

Check out the drawing mode in TeXmacs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baF3kpx_JSo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baF3kpx_JSo

the-mitr 5y ago

I use a variety of options depending on the complexity of the illustration. I use tikz for very simple figures, while geogebra for mathematical ones with tikz/pgf export. I use Inkscape to render drawings which have more elements and are complex with latex output included.

mNovak 5y ago

These look excellent. On the other hand, I still make an embarrassing amount of technical figures using powerpoint built in shapes.

bbkane 5y ago
Try https://excalidraw.com/ https://excalidraw.com/ - it's SUPER NICE for these simple "shape" diagrams.
- mNovak 5y ago
  It is a very nice looking tool, but I can't live without ellipse arcs. The bezier elbow lines always look so cheap to me.
- orlp 5y ago
  I wish there was something as polished and easy to use as excalidraw that wasn't as minimalistic in its features.
  - quickthrower2 5y ago
    I like the minimalist featureset. I end up making the sketch, not shaving the yak. Yes a rectangle makes a perfectly good text input, and also a mobile phone screen. It's a versatile shape!
- amelius 5y ago
  Question: how do you add a label to an arrow (such that it stays on the arrow if you move it)?
  - emi2k01 5y ago
    You can select the label and the arrow and press control+G to create a group. You can also do the opposite, pin the arrow to the label so that if the label moves the arrow follows: double click the arrow to see the path points, select an end point and move it on top of the label until you see the bounding box of the label.
    - amelius 5y ago
      I tried it but it only semi-worked. The label moves with the arrow, but if I move one side of the arrow (by moving the box it is attached to) the label does not move. (Note: I want the label on the arrow, not on its endpoints).
bzxcvbn 5y ago
If it works, it works.
- amelius 5y ago
  Until it doesn't and you have to redo your entire drawing in another tool ... It is always better to choose a tool where you're least likely to run into a dead-end street.
  - bzxcvbn 5y ago
    If you know in advance that you're not going to need a more powerful, more complicated/expensive/... tool, then it's okay and even recommended to use the "lesser" tool. If I need to screw in a few screws, am I better off buying a small screwdriver or a professional 18V screwdriver/drill combo with 24 add-ons? Who knows, it depends on my projects and my skills, but it's entirely possible that buying the $5 screwdriver is the appropriate thing to do.
    - amelius 5y ago
      That's a bad example because you can always switch to the powertool if needed without building your project from scratch.

Gualdrapo 5y ago

This should have a (2019) in the title. If I'm not wrong, somewhere between 2019 and now Inkscape 1.0 was released. And now the betas have numerous new features and UI changes, most notably the introduction of multiple pages in a single document. Besides, framing Inkscape as a "free — but arguably less featureful — alternative to Adobe Illustrator. You can use it for designing flyers and logos ~~like in the picture below~~, but it’s also a powerful tool for drawing mathematical figures" seems poor and rather unfair to it. Its compliance to the SVG standard makes it the best tool to produce scalable graphics for the web and it's extensively used to develop icon systems and theming in multiple FOSS software.

dang 5y ago
Year added above. Thanks!
akeck 5y ago
Heh. I must have missed the introduction of the multiple pages feature. I used to hand-write math homework in Inkscape with a Wacom tablet. I found it unusually effective, but the single page limit always made longer problems a bit unwieldy. (Note: I could never get my head around doing problem sets directly in LaTeX, although I did mostly OK using it for proofs in my analysis classes.)
flobosg 5y ago
Multiple pages? Finally! I started making slide presentations in Inkscape, and the option of exporting to multi-page PDFs will come in handy! More info: https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php?title=Release_notes/1.2#Page_tool https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php?title=Release_notes...
geokon 5y ago
But have any of the issues the article addresses been smoothed out? The guy basically built a whole macro layer to make inkscape less clunky
- syntheweave 5y ago
  The UI is getting fixed up in piecemeal fashion, gradually moving around elements or consolidating them. If you want to see the full details, the devs stream and record video showing progress and reviewing major new versions. Specific to this article, the alignment tools have recently gotten a pass of updates - something which everyone doing technical drawings can make use of. Layers and objects have been merged into one panel and the update performance of the panel uses a more scalable algorithm now, making it easier to navigate the document in outline form and reducing some of the burdens of object manipulation that the author calls out to external code for. Styling still needs improvement but IIRC there is work in progress on swatches that might address that. It's now possible to use a command bar to type in commands (as is the trend with every complex app) which addresses some of the use of macros. Shortcut binding is in need a pass to improve assignability; that would eliminate a second source of pain.

jofer 5y ago

Inkscape is great for technical figures, especially cartoons like the examples shown here. At least in my field, purely conceptual futures are called "cartoons" to distinguish from "figures" which are based on observational data. A former advisor of mine had a quote that I'll happily steal here: "A cartoon is the highest form of scientific communication". Distilling a concept down to a very simple illustration is an underappreciated artform. Inkscape is really great for scientific cartoons. I've used illustrator for many years, as well, and it's more powerful, but lacks something for quick bare-bones sketches compared to inkscape. There are things that illustrator is far better suited for, but these sort of conceptual sketches are kind of a sweet spot for inkscape.

uneekname 5y ago
I saw in your profile that you’re a geologist, and as a geology major about to finish my undergrad I’m particularly interested in how you’ve used Inkscape to create scientific cartoons. I’ve been using Inkscape to complete assignments for my classes, and it’s been an uphill (yet rewarding!) battle. It seems that my professors and peers each have a different program of choice, so I decided to forge my own way with OSS. My contact info can be found in my profile if you prefer.
- jofer 5y ago
  I've used it for figures, posters, etc for many years. For the most part, no one cares too much about what you use, more about the final figure. If you're working so closely with someone that you're sharing raw files (e.g. they're using illustrator and want you to share a .ai file), you're going to hit issues, certainly. However, most work will focus on the end result -- i.e. a paper with static exported figures. At any rate, there's nothing wrong with the proprietary tools either -- they're great. It's just a matter of what you can get access to and what's best for the use case at hand. If it helps to have some examples, pretty much every figure in my dissertation was made with a combination of matplotlib, QGIS, and Inkscape: http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/YHJWFVKMNVZGN8S http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/YHJWFVKMNVZGN8S E.g. see fig 2.12 for a cartoon made purely in Inkscape and things like fig 2.4 or 2.6 are a combination of matplotlib and Inkscape.

baby 5y ago

When I started writing papers I was really bullish on tikz. I thought that professional looking papers should have figures that were precise to the mm. But the time it takes to get something useful is just insane. I quickly moved to the vectorial drawing tool I had handy: keynote. It’s really not made for that, but it has enough features that you can quickly use it to do pretty things. I ended up using keynote to do all the figures in Real-World Cryptography https://www.amazon.com/dp/1617296716/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_GAKDNA2H5BBJVHC50DR3 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1617296716/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_GA... You can see some example in this thread: https://twitter.com/cryptodavidw/status/1436368473395925000?s=21&t=9Z1R538TO1oEx36pLkvWcg https://twitter.com/cryptodavidw/status/1436368473395925000?...

iratewizard 5y ago
I personally use Adobe XD for almost everything vector. It's not the job it's made for, but it's way faster to work in and is easier to organize. No need to switch between lucidcharts, illustrator and XD when everything I need is in one place.
andrei_says_ 5y ago
Went through the Twitter thread and these look really great. Clear, understandable, just enough detail and context. Congratulations on creating this book and putting it out into the world.
rg111 5y ago
> I quickly moved to the vectorial drawing tool I had handy: keynote. It’s really not made for that [...] You would be surprised at how many figures are drawn with PowerPoint on papers at top Machine Learning conferences.
- beanjuice 5y ago
  I would say a large proportion of top chemical/materials science papers are also drawn in only powerpoint (besides data, where origin>matlab>excel).
kashyapc 5y ago

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago

I love inkskape, but I wish it took some interface tips from modern graphical software like Sketch. Inkscape's interface hasn't changed much in the last 15 years or more, and since then a LOT has changed in the UX world. Tools like Sketch and Figma introduced so many tiny interface and usability improvements, that when combined with each other they raise productivity be a factor of 10 or more for tasks like drawing a vector icon.

Gigachad 5y ago
I remember I tried to use Inkscape for a logo once and was so frustrated I ended up just writing the SVG in to jsfiddle because I couldn’t work out how in Inkscape.
amelius 5y ago
What I'd like to see is a constraint solver, where e.g. you can fix distances, angles, projections, etc. Also missing is Path->Calligraphic stroke conversion, arguably the most important tool for cartoon drawing.
- delusional 5y ago
  Having experimented a bit in the space i think constraint solvers are actually a little overhyped for 2d drawing. I find just being able to do math and rendering the drawing from text to be enough.
  - amelius 5y ago
    Ok. How about a way to enter LaTeX expressions in-place?
    - jedbrown 5y ago
      TexText (Re-editable LaTeX graphics for Inkscape) is a neat plugin. https://textext.github.io/textext/index.html https://textext.github.io/textext/index.html
5y ago

klyrs 5y ago

I am thoroughly ashamed that I have overlooked the option to render text through latex for all these years.

Waterluvian 5y ago

Can someone recommend me an Ubuntu friendly application that’s one step up from MS Paint? I find Inkscape and GIMP far too heavy and tedious for my needs: I work remote and just want to doodle on a screenshot.

wrp 4y ago
> Ubuntu friendly application that’s one step up from MS Paint mtPaint -- For Windows and Linux, and very stable. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtPaint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtPaint)
schaefer 5y ago
You might try Krita.
hyakosm 5y ago
KolourPaint is a better alternative to MS Paint with pretty much the same UI.
bzxcvbn 5y ago
If you're actually using Windows (you mention MS paint), there's built-in functionality to doodle on screenshots. It's built on the same tech as e.g. onenote so it's surprisingly good. Just press win+shift+s. For an existing photo/screenshot, just open it with the default image viewer and click modify. And the "pro-tip", if I may: when you take a screenshot, it gets copied in your clipboard. Try pasting it somewhere. It works in an astouding number of places.
cturtle 5y ago
Try flameshot. It’s a screenshot tool that has a builtin mini editor with arrows, lines, drawing, etc. very basic but still useful for marking up a screenshot.
_emacsomancer_ 5y ago
As mentioned below, there's Krita, which is very drawing oriented. Maybe also Xournal++ - I use it for drawing on/annotating documents on video calls.

nonrandomstring 5y ago

Of several FOSS tools I regularly use for technical diagrams Inkscape has the best balance of olskool accurate features and modern "designy" type stuff. XFig is my old friend, and I love its inbuilt library of 1970's style clip art, icons, and technical symbols. But XFig feels clunky now. Dia is a useful quick tool for drawing boxes and sticks. But Inkscape has the overall balance right. Light enough to draw a quick diagram, featured enough to design a book cover or complex layered diagram. One feature I love is scanning/tracing bitmaps to layered SVG objects that can be broken apart, simplified and remixed. I noticed when using Openshot video editor under Linux recently that it integrates seamlessly with Inkscape and Blender for designing animated titles.

blip54321 5y ago

This looks awesome. I'd pay $50 to have this workflow fully integrated and working with my editor (emacs; I'd also take VSCode or something else that's not vim). apt-get install a few things, and it works. That's conveying value-add, not suggesting someone should do it for that amount (which is to say I'd gladly pay, but I can't imagine it's worth doing for that amount, or that there's a reasonably way to find and collect $$$ from more people like me).

karthink 5y ago
Emacs integration for the OP's style of inkscape usage[1] My fork with personalizations[2] Org-mode integration for Krita[3] and Xournal[4] [1] https://github.com/foxfriday/ink https://github.com/foxfriday/ink [2] https://github.com/karthink/ink https://github.com/karthink/ink [3] https://github.com/lepisma/org-krita https://github.com/lepisma/org-krita [4] https://gitlab.com/vherrmann/org-xournalpp https://gitlab.com/vherrmann/org-xournalpp
- blip54321 5y ago
  Thank you!

adhesive_wombat 5y ago

Call me cheugy, but there is absolutely no way that I'd be able to use any computer graphics tool effectively during a lecture to draw diagrammatic notes of any substantial complexity, and pay attention to the lecture at the same time.

majewsky 5y ago
Depends on how well you know the tool. I wrote my lecture notes for Graph Theory in LaTeX+TikZ, but it only went well because I had been doing TikZ drawings frequently for about 2 years by that point, and also the course was introductory level, so the drawings were rather simple. For most other courses, we had a process involving at least two people, wherein one person would take notes in LaTeX with placeholders where the images need to go, and one person would take notes by hand, including images. Then we would produce the drawings either via TikZ or via Inkscape afterwards. This could be streamlined into one person doing LaTeX notes with placeholders, who also drew the images on paper to later insert them into the digital version.

henshao 5y ago

This seems like the right thread to ask. I love the idea of tools like these to be able to easily and programmatically draw diagrams, but eventually it gets thrown into a powerpoint, where then it is locked behind some tool and arcane DSL that only I know. So when my boss who doesn't care about the tools inevitable wants to move the arrow up an inch or make the box green instead of blue, I have to go back to do it. Meaning I give up on using these tools so I don't end up a fulltime diagram engineer. Anyone know of a tool that is close to inkscape/graphviz, but has an "export back to powerpoint" feature?

zelphirkalt 5y ago
If the boss wants to "move arrows up" then it is possible, that the boss should have been involved in the design process, or keep feedback for later to be worked in, but not in the middle of a presentation. And please ... Don't do software modelling in powerpoints. It is quite painful to watch that happening. It lowers interest in contributing of people, who would have used a proper tool for such a job and would have been 3x faster that way.

umutisik 5y ago

I use a program called Latexdraw that gives the best of both worlds. You can draw with the GUI and get pstricks code and use latex expressions and math fonts. (Free, author accepts donations) http://latexdraw.sourceforge.net/ http://latexdraw.sourceforge.net/

procedurecall 5y ago

With all the discussion here about alternative programs to make vector graphics for mathematical figures, I'm a little surprised no one has mentioned Ipe (https://ipe.otfried.org/ https://ipe.otfried.org/), given it's far and away the most popular tool in my field (and has good native support for LaTeX expressions). It certainly doesn't have all the features that Inkscape supports (although it does have quite a lot of features), but the features it does have are implemented with a heavy emphasis on ease-of-use. It's sometimes easier to brainstorm within the program than on paper. It's also plenty easy to add useful plugins in Lua: At one point I coded a plugin to check if a diagram of a graph contained a Hamiltonian cycle (by calling an external C++ program I wrote that used simple backtracking). I was able to very quickly experiment with which of my small graphs and modifications to said graphs ended up having Hamiltonian cycles, and was able to narrow down some useful features to think about.

bmitc 5y ago
What is your field? As someone who likes the idea of and quality of images that TikZ produces but not how obtuse it is, I've done a fair amount of research into this space at times. However, I've never heard of Ipe. Even if I had, I'm not sure I'd use it. The material is basically devoid of examples. How does one learn how to use it?
- procedurecall 5y ago
  I work mostly on computational geometry and graph algorithms, and some related things (although I certainly don't have a very long list of publications). Ipe is written entirely by one person (Otfried Cheong), who works on a lot of computational geometry, which is likely part of why it's most well-known among this group. I've used Ipe for every diagram in every paper I've ever published, and I used them for all the figures in the slides of a course I taught a couple years ago. Clearly I'm a bit biased, but having used TikZ a small but painful number of times during my undergraduate degree, I'd be more than happy if I never have to work with it again. Like everyone else I know, I learned Ipe through trial and error, with a handful of little tidbits of advice. 90% of the functionality you will use is quite intuitive and right there on the interface if you hover over things (and all the tools also have keyboard shortcuts of course). Some of the tips I've given/been given over the years that are less intuitive are: - You can save directly in PDF and re-edit a PDF saved with Ipe. This is very helpful for a LaTeX project, since PDF files are very easy to import (even ones with multiple pages). - When you import into a LaTeX project, the dimensions of the figure will be cropped to the dimensions of the actual content (this may be obvious to some, but it wasn't to me). - You can edit the alignment of text (and other various hidden options) by right clicking on objects in select mode. - The different snapping modes are probably the killer feature of Ipe. You can snap to the intersection of curves, to the vertices of polylines, and much more. Between the intersection snapping mode, circle tool, and line segment tool, you can technically perform any compass-ruler construction you want from Euclidean geometry (with has been useful a handful of times for me surprisingly). - Selection of objects is a bit funny (but often useful): If you select from top-left to bottom-right, then you will only select things your selection box fully encapsulates. If you select instead from bottom-right to top-left, you will select anything your selection box intersects. - Writing extensions and editing configs (incl changing page dimensions, colour palette, text size palette) is unfortunately quite painful, and I can only recommend digging through the examples. I believe there is documentation somewhere, but I found it less than helpful. - You can edit the underlying points of any curve you place after the fact by using the "edit" option in the right-click menu. - In order to use the regular k-gon "ipelet" (under ipelets->goodies IIRC), you need to have a circle present first (which you can of course delete afterwards). Ipelets are the mechanism by which you can program functionality with Lua, and this is probably the one I use the most (it comes built in with the program). In my personal opinion, the only major weak point of Ipe is how annoying it is to rotate things (to the point where I often prefer to redraw things in rotated form, unless it's quite complex). To do this you need to very carefully select a pivot point type and a rotation type through the right-click menu. You also have to be very conscious of snapping as you perform the rotation.

newrotik 5y ago

Have had to do lots of technical / latex-y drawings in the past as academic, and found Ipe [0] to be incredibly useful. It is very minimalistic and easy to use. The images produced are simple to embed in latex documents, and they fit the style/font of the rest of the document. I think this tool should be a lot more popular than it is. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipe_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipe_(software) -- using the wikipedia link since the official site doesn't have many screenshots

mhh__ 5y ago

One of my pet theories/takes is that if any billionaire wants to make science more productive they need to fund a modern replacement of LaTeX and really streamline flows for things like this. TikZ in particular but latex in general has awful compile times in part because of it's ancient design.

ramraj07 5y ago
Lol a simpler latex is so far down my list of what needs to be fixed in science it’s comical as a suggestion. Here are three options for you: 1. Use latex as is, if this is your bread and butter the initial setup and learning curve is a few weeks. 2. Use overleaf. And please don’t start on “I’ll never submit my data to a cloud” no billionaire is going to not take your data. 3. Use word and let your assistant digitize your diagrams. Point is the tool to make figures is not what’s slowing down good science. It’s the heads that do it that are a problem
- mhh__ 5y ago
  I think it does slow down progress enough to be worth considering because it's clunky but more importantly because it's ancient so there is almost no ability to extract metadata or properly target anything other than print as a first class target. In teaching for example I think a book of basically just symbols is dated, we should be trying richer ways to display textbooks (e.g. beyond mere hypertext), using information either annotated or extracted from the source. This isn't about figures but rather making it more productive to use in general, and making its use more semantically analysable, and more deterministic: If you include data in a paper is it actually up to date? Does that expression actually solve the equation etc. These are all things you could check automatically. There are obviously bigger problems in science but what are you gonna do about them? It's nearly all political either in the department's or in government, whereas a new LaTeX is a relatively direct thing that can be done with a small team and a lot of money.
sicp-enjoyer 5y ago
> modern replacement of LaTeX It's one of the most reliable and useful pieces of software, and it seems to be doing just fine. Most efforts at modernization focus on extension, either with packages, other languages, GUIs, etc. > latex in general has awful compile times in part because of it's ancient design. I would expect the "ancient" to mean it's faster, as it was designed for a more restricted resource environment, and Knuth tailors optimal algorithms for each task. For example, the single-pass is ergonomically a pain, because you often have to run it multiple times to get the final output but it also makes it faster. Do you have ideas about alternative architectures that would improve performance?

msravi 5y ago

I use Geogebra to draw, and then export as PGF/TikZ. You can then edit the code to fine-tune or make any modifications. Works very well. The advantage is that you can also include plots in the figures along with SVG. Not sure if Inkscape allows that.

jzer0cool 5y ago

Curious about the right side of terminal, there is a white screen. Is this integrated into the terminal, or is this a different window?

s1291 5y ago

OP shared the link without even reading it!

joeberon 5y ago