Graphics libraries for mathematical diagrams

[mtbc]

For many years PostScript^® was my go-to means of generating mathematical diagrams. I used to live near the American Mathematical Society and daydreamed of having a job coding illustrations for them. One should not be deceived by the machine-readable horror generated by PostScript printer drivers: it is a nice language. For example, in creating the simple logo,


my underlying PostScript code introspects into the outline of the letters defined by the font to nestle the a and e together perfectly. Similarly, for charts I would write the raw data into arrays and have layout code running in the printer to render them according to the current page width and suchlike, rather like one might now do in JavaScript using jqPlot. Printing documents that embed such code can take a while as the printer thinks but it is not like it was otherwise doing anything better with the time. These days I must resort to cheaper printers so I end up embedding fonts and converting such documents into PCL6 before printing.

PostScript is becoming increasingly obsolete: if nothing else it makes Unicode awkward. I am thus thinking that perhaps I ought to move to using a vector graphics library from some general-purpose programming language, one that allows me to easily create precise diagrams just as PostScript does. (The hand-placed arrows I see in people's PowerPoint slides appall me.) Years ago I would have opted for Cairo which outputs into PNG and PDF but does that remain a good choice or is it starting to rot as all the cool kids move to a shinier new world?

Comments

[emperor]

For diagrams in my LaTeX documents I use TikZ, which does produce reasonable output.

[mtbc]

It does indeed, I've rather liked it, mostly for boxes-and-arrows kinds of things but it can do quite a lot. I find that Basser Lout's @Diagram and its kin usually beats it a little in usability but TikZ is rather more widely used so it is going to please collaborators far more; it also fits nicely when a journal or whatever already has a ready-made LaTeX template.