[kwlug-disc] Software to draw illustrations?

[Hubert Chathi]

On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 06:18:17 -0800, Doug Moen <doug at moens.org> said:

> Inkscape is a really popular vector graphics program, for art and
> design.  For technical diagrams, libre office draw might be a better
> option (as mentioned by Sandeep).

> If you need correctly typeset mathematical equations as well, then
> there are some very powerful diagramming tools made by the Tex/latex
> community, which I keep meaning to investigate some day. These are
> programming languages that generate diagrams, so there is a steep
> learning curve. The ones I've heard of are metapost and tikz.

tikz is used quite a bit, but I find it hard to understand.  I generally
like asymptote when I need to do that kind of diagrams (which is not
very often nowadays).

As you say, these types of tools are programming languages, so they're
not as easy to use, but on the other hand, you get a lot of power too.

There are also special-purpose tools for constructing certain types of
diagrams.  For example, graphviz, plantuml, mscgen, or octave.