[OS X TeX] Figure (tikz?) question

[Michael Sharpe]

> On Dec 11, 2016, at 2:37 PM, David Craig <dac at panix.com> wrote:
> 
> Apologies in advance for the non-TeXShop-specific question.
> 
> I need to create computer-produced versions of these two figures:
> 
> <http://web.lemoyne.edu/~craigda/Images/Research/paths.pdf>
> <http://web.lemoyne.edu/~craigda/Images/Research/spinfoamlqc-1M.pdf>
> 
> My graphics-program skills are adequate, not awesome, and these will be painful.  Before I go down that route, though, these figures seem to me to be likely candidates for one of the TeX drawing programs.   I’m not familiar with these at all beyond being vaguely familiar with their existence (e.g. tikz) and having seen some figures produced with them.
> 
> I’m on a pretty short timeline.   I’m asking for advice, really.   Is going to be possible to create these figures in a reasonable amount of time starting from very little knowledge?   If so, which should I use?   tikz?   What’s the best way (resource, that is) to get up to speed?

For the simple diagrams you want to draw, the most commonly used (pstricks, tikz, asymptote---all powerful, and with a steep learning curve) may be overkill. The picture environment that is built into LaTeX is now much better than it used to be, and should be able to do the job. It has only a limited set of operations and so is not hard to learn. You can enhance the repetitious tasks there with
\usepackage{pgffor}
which allows you to write, eg, \foreach \x in {..} (a list like {1,3,...,99})

See 

https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb33-1/tb103becc-picture.pdf

or 

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Picture

for details of the picture environment.

Michael