[OS X TeX] Re: graphics with xelatex

[Luis Sequeira]

>>
>> I have been involved in a book for which I have been using XeLaTeX.
>> I do most of my illustrations in pstricks and I would not care to
>> give it up.
>> I tried pdftricks, and it was working, but made typesetting a lot
>> slower, since it was redoing all the illustrations every time.
>>
>> My current solution, which has been working well, is to do the
>> illustrations separately, using latex+dvips+ps2pdf, and use
>> \includegraphics to put them in the main document.
>>
>
> Probably a stupid question but I can't help it: if you
> includegraphics them, why not draw them in a graphics program?
>
> I do and save two copies, one in Intaglio for further/future editing
> if necessary and one in cropped pdf for includegraphics. (Intaglio
> remembers to place them in different folders.)
>
> Curious regards
> --schremmer
>
>


I don't think it's a stupid question.

I understand that pstricks is not for everyone. But if you do  
mathematical drawings, it's much better to do them using coordinates,  
and to be able to precisely describe
and obtain exactly what you intended.
And that is much easier (and elegant) to achieve with pstricks than  
with any other system I've come across.
The situation would probably be different if I were trying to do some  
freestyle drawing, of course.

You can draw circles, ellipses, polygons, graphs, you can fill,  
rotate, scale, connect nodes, etc., all with a consistent LaTeX  
syntax, and using Cartesian or polar coordinates - in combination, if  
necessary.
It's much easier to reuse and adapt your drawings, etc. You can  
create \newcommand's to draw specific elements and then place them in  
precise positions. The possibilities are endless.

Just to give you a case in point: I taught a course on Discrete  
Mathematics, for which I drew *douzains* of graphs. All were done in  
pstricks, inside the LaTeX documents (I used the powerdot class for  
presentations).
In that case, I did not need to use \includegraphics, but I still  
would draw them the same way and use \includegraphics if I had to.

I drew a complete graph with 28 vertices (it has 378 edges!) using  
some five lines of code. That you can't replicate in a drawing program.

Luis Sequeira


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