[OS X TeX] Drawing diagrams: what's better?

Luís Vitório Cargnini lvcargnini at gmail.com
Mon May 17 21:39:53 CEST 2010


Hi to all,

Sorry to ask but ... what is R ?

Vitorio.

Le 17 mai 2010 à 19:14, Alan Munn a écrit :

> 
> On May 17, 2010, at 10:02 AM, John B. Thoo wrote:
> 
>> Hi, everyone.  I hope this isn't a FAQ: Is it better to draw diagrams using something like PSTricks or Tikz, or something like xfig or Inkscape?  What are the pros and cons?  TIA.
> 
> 
> As others have said, a lot depends on what kinds of data you are drawing.  As a user of both PSTricks and TikZ, for most things they are equivalent; if I were starting from scratch, I would recommend going with TikZ, since it works seamlessly with pdflatex and xelatex, whereas pstricks needs to be compiled with latex - dvips- ps2pdf (not entirely accurate, but close enough).
> 
> TikZ is also somewhat better documented, (although the documentation is not always the easiest to understand).  But the documentation for pstricks has improved dramatically recently.  Both have substantial user bases and are well supported, so getting questions answered is usually not too difficult either, although my impression is that more people are now using TikZ over PStricks.  PStricks has superior mathematical capabilities since TikZ relies on TeX's math.  Both have substantial libraries for commonly drawn elements, which often times makes them superior to any GUI type program, again depending on the sorts of things you are drawing.
> 
> For plotting real data, though, output from e.g. R would make more sense.  (There's even a TikZ output device being developed for R, which would be another reason to use TikZ if you are independently using R.)
> 
> Alan
> 
> 
> -- 
> Alan Munn
> amunn at gmx.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
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