[texhax] diagrams on Windows

[Niall Mansfield]

David,

  > A student of mine who is starting out with LaTeX on Windows, is in need of 
  > a way to produce diagrams. (She writing a paper in 2-dimensional category 
  > theory, if that helps.)

It's not clear whether your student wants a procedural drawing
tool, or a WYSIWYG one; if she's very much a Windows person, it
may be that she will find WYSIWYG almost essential.

WYSIWYG
-------
Here we've used InkScape (also available on *nix) extensively
over the last few years, and it has served us very well indeed.
We do all our book covers with it, and use it for all network
diagrams in our computing books.  For examples see:
	http://uit.co.uk/altdns
and in the box on the top right click on 
	inkscape-diagram-examples.pdf
(Note that the fonts don't show up well on-screen,
for reasons that are irrelevant here; they print perfectly, which
is what we made them for.)

Other people use Dia or Scribus.  We haven't used them for anything serious.

Procedural
----------
The MetaPost language/tool is very powerful, tho' perhaps complex
for a new user.  However, it does let you produce multiple diagrams
that are consistent, and you can make global changes across a whole
set of diagrams (e.g. in a book).  For examples see:
	http://uit.co.uk/sustainable
and in the box on the top right click on 
	sample-metapost-diagrams.pdf

Regards,
Niall



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Niall Mansfield                         
    UIT Cambridge Ltd.                  
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