Drawing with TeX

There are many packages to do pictures in (La)TeX itself (rather than importing graphics created externally), ranging from simple use of LaTeX picture environment, through enhancements like eepic, to sophisticated (but slow) drawing with PicTeX. Depending on your type of drawing, and setup, here are a few systems you may consider:

• PicTeX is a venerable, and very powerful, system, that draws by placing dots on the page to give the effect of a line or curve. While this has the potential of great power, it is (of course) much slower than any of the other established packages. What’s more, there are problems with its documentation.
• epic was designed to make use of the LaTeX picture environment somewhat less agonising; eepic extends it, and is capable of using tpic \special commands to improve printing performance. (If the \specials aren’t available, the eepicemu will do the business, far less efficiently.
• pict2e; this was advertised in the LaTeX manual, but didn’t appear for nearly ten years after publication of the book! It removes all the petty restrictions that surround the use of the picture environment. It therefore suffers only from the rather eccentric drawing language of the environment, and is a far more useful tool than the original environment has ever been. (Note that pict2e supersedes David Carlisle’s stop-gap pspicture.)
• PSTricks; this gives you access to all the power of PostScript from TeX itself, by sophisticated use of \special commands. Since PostScript is itself a pretty powerful programming language, many astounding things can in principle be achieved using PSTricks (a wide range of contributed packages, ranging from world mapping to lens design diagrams, is available). Pstricks’ \specials are by default specific to dvips, but VTeX (both in its commercial and in its free versions) understands them. PDFTeX users may use pst-pdf, which (like epstopdf — see PDFLaTeX graphics) generates PDF files using an auxiliary program, from PSTricks commands (pst-pdf also requires a recent installation of the preview package).

  There is a PSTricks mailing list (pstricks@tug.org) which you may join, or you may just browse the list archives.

• pgf: while pstricks is very powerful and convenient, using it with PDFLaTeX is an awful fidget: if you simply want the graphical capabilities, pgf, together with its rather pleasing “user-oriented” interface tikz, may be a good bet for you. While PDF has (in essence) the same graphical capabilities as PostScript, it isn’t programmable; pgf provides common LaTeX commands that will utilise the graphical capabilities of both PostScript and PDF equally.
• MetaPost; you liked Metafont, but never got to grips with font files? Try MetaPost — all the power of Metafont, but it generates PostScript figures; MetaPost is nowadays part of most serious (La)TeX distributions. Knuth uses it for all his work…
• Mfpic; you liked Metafont, but can’t understand the language? The package makes up Metafont or MetaPost code for you within using familiar-looking TeX macros. Not quite the full power of MetaPost, but a friendlier interface; of course, with MetaPost output, the results can be used equally well in either LaTeX or PDFLaTeX.
• You liked PicTeX but don’t have enough memory or time? Look at Eitan Gurari’s dratex, which is as powerful as most other TeX drawing packages, but is an entirely new implementation, which is not as hard on memory, is much more readable (and is fully documented).

dratex.sty

graphics/dratex (or browse the directory); catalogue entry

epic.sty

macros/latex/contrib/epic (or browse the directory); catalogue entry

eepic.sty

macros/latex/contrib/eepic (or browse the directory); catalogue entry

eepicemu.sty

macros/latex/contrib/eepic (or browse the directory); catalogue entry

mfpic

graphics/mfpic (or browse the directory)

preview.sty

macros/latex/contrib/preview (or browse the directory); catalogue entry

pspicture.sty

macros/latex/contrib/pspicture (or browse the directory); catalogue entry

pst-pdf.sty

macros/latex/contrib/pst-pdf (or browse the directory); catalogue entry

pgf.sty

graphics/pgf (or browse the directory); catalogue entry

pict2e.sty

macros/latex/contrib/pict2e (or browse the directory); catalogue entry

pictex.sty

graphics/pictex (or browse the directory); catalogue entry

pstricks

graphics/pstricks (or browse the directory); catalogue entry

tikz.sty

Distributed with graphics/pgf (or browse the directory); catalogue entry

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