[OS X TeX] Asymptote tutorial?

[Franck Pastor]

Le 21 avr. 2013 à 13:05, Peter Dyballa <Peter_Dyballa at Web.DE> a écrit :

> 
> 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.

As far as I know, If you use Asymptote in its inline mode — that is to say, if you use the "Asymptote" LaTeX package with the "inline" option, then Asymptote (the program) uses by default the font of your LaTeX document.

> 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.

See above…

> 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…

Asymptote is fully compatible with Xe(La)TeX (which I don't use, so I've not tested this compatibility). As far as I know, it (still) can't be used with Lua(La)TeX.

Anyway, it can't be doubted that Tikz is better integrated to LaTeX than Asymptote. Still, it is easier to program your own macros/functions in Asymptote since it's a full-fledged programming language, close to C++. And it is very powerful, far more than Tikz, especially for 3D drawings which Asymptote fully supports. See this very impressive documentation (also in French):

http://marris.org/ressources/ASY_3D.pdf


Franck Pastor