[OS X TeX] Asymptote tutorial?

[Don Green Dragon]

Hello Peter,

On 21Apr2013, at 5:05 AM, Peter Dyballa wrote:

> 
> Am 21.04.2013 um 04:31 schrieb Alain Schremmer:
> 
>> If you don't know French, I have long been thinking of getting to work on Asymptote so you would give me an excuse actually to get started.
> 
> When you want to start using graphics elements inside LaTeX files, then I'd recommend to start with TikZ/PGF. Among the advantages is that you do not need/do not depend on any external utilities. Your workflow is very straightforward and simple. In case of bugs you have only one dependency: that from the author. No-one else needed to upgrade or patch and then rebuild the external utilities. The fonts used in TikZ/PGF are exactly the same as used in LaTeX. It cannot happen that by using am encoded LaTeX font of the same name the text in the asy picture is also re-encoded – and may read something different. Similarly when you decide to save some trees and reduce the font size from 12pt to 11pt or less. With TikZ/PGF you do not have to change anything, other graphics packages are less flexible. Moreover, using XeTeX or LuaTeX you can use non-English text for labels and annotations, even Right-To-Left scripts. TikZ/PGF also has clever concepts for repetitions…
> 
> 	texdoc tikz


Your advice above is much appreciated here. Up to this point I've been using overkill applications like Inkscape. They work, but Inkscape, for example, is a bit of a monster to use and the manual is dreadful. After casually looking at TFM tikz, I like the compactness of the code for simple graphic displays, which, in the main, are the kind of graphic displays that I need.


Don Green Dragon
fergdc at Shaw.ca