What software programs are used to draw physics diagrams, and what are their relative merits?

Question

People undoubtedly use a variety of programs to draw diagrams for physics, but I am not familiar with many of them. I usually hand-draw things in GIMP. GIMP is powerful in some regards, but it's time consuming to do things like draw circles or arrows because I make them from more primitive tools. It is also difficult to be precise.

I know some people use LaTeX, but am not sure how versatile or easy it is. The only other tools I know are Microsoft Paint and the tools built into Microsoft Office.

Which tools are commonly used? What are their good and bad points (features, ease of use, portability, etc.)?

I am looking for a tool with flexibility and minimal learning curve/development time. I would like to hand-draw and to drag-and-drop pre-made shapes, but I also want to specify the locations of curves and shapes with equations when I want better precision. Some minimal programming functionality would also be nice (i.e. the ability to run through a loop that draws a series of lines with a varying parameter).

Please recommend a few pieces of software if they're good for different situations.

Answer 1

I've had good experiences with Inkscape. It has a GUI interface, but allows you to enter coordinates directly if you want, and it's scriptable. There is a plug-in that allows you to enter LaTeX directly (for labels and such). The downside is that it is very much still in development, so sometimes you find that a feature you want is not completely implemented yet.

As an example, here is a poster I made last week, entirely within Inkscape:

Inkscape now also has the "JessyInk" plug-in which allows you to use it to make presentations (à la Powerpoint). The presentation can be viewed in a web browser as SVG, or exported to PDF.

If you have a Mac and don't mind spending some money ($100), I've heard good things about OmniGraffle.

Answer 2

I'm learning TikZ (a drawing package for LaTeX) as we speak. It's good for two-dimensional line drawings, the syntax for specifying shapes and curves is extremely versatile, but the learning curve is steeper than LaTeX even.

There is a superb gallery of TikZ examples.

Answer 3

I'll interpret your term diagram as "any fancy image that captures some physics".

For this I can hardly recommend anything else then MetaPost. It's on par with TeX in being a little hard to learn but once you do master the basics you won't believe you could have ever used anything else (in particular, GIMP and Inkscape; good analogy here would be to TeX vs. MS Word).

Basic properties

1. it's a (simple) programming language
2. it's vectorial (this should probably go without saying but still)
3. it's primitives are things like points, lines, paths, splines
4. it contains excellent image manipulation facilities; you can say things like "take this image, scale it up by two and rotate it by 60 degrees"
5. you can insert TeX labels
6. it can solve equations; This is a real killer that no one else offers. You can draw two curves $X(t)$ and $Y(t)$ (defined most comfortably as splines) and tell MP to compute their intersection, draw a point there and label it with some text

Success story

I used MP to create some polygons on a hexagonal lattice in the context of cluster expansions. There was a huge number of those polygons to draw, so I quickly abandoned all hope of trying to draw them by hand in Inkscape or something similar. True, it would probably be quicker in the end, but I hate manual work; I rather spend much longer learning some programming language and then just code all the work in few minutes. So I put together simple MP program that has converted my input data (vertices and edges of the polygons as just numbers) into beautiful images. For a one night's work and my first time with MP I was more than satisfied.

Goodies

Credit for this amazing picture goes to Johan Kåhrström (go also see more stuff under illustrations there).

• http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~mackay/metapost/
• http://www.ursoswald.ch/metapost/tutorial.html
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Contravariant_Coordinates.png

Answer 4

First of all do not use a raster graphics software like Gimp to draw pictures. This has serious disadvantages when you want to make screen readable documents (the picture pixelizes). For this purpose always use vector graphics. Wikipedia has a nice list of vector graphics software. Among them, I'd recommend the following:

• Inkscape (Cross-platform): Although the learning curve is a bit steep, its worth it. Note that Inkscape was not meant for making scientific diagram. Still you'll find a LaTeX plugin, export to LaTeX/PSTricks etc.

• Dia (Cross-platform): Very simple and easy, but not very powerful. Can't process LaTeX.

• Ipe (Cross-platform): Ipe is something in between Inkscape and Dia. Also Ipe was designed for scientific drawing. Can process LaTeX source code and import PDF figures.

• WinFIG (Cross-platform): Although commercial, its quite popular in the scientific community.

EDIT: Wikipedia has a nice page which discusses various software that can be used to create figures. See Wikipedia:How to create graphs for Wikipedia articles

Answer 5

I would try matplotlib, but first check here http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/gallery.html and decide if these pictures satisfies your needs. Also click some picture and inspect source code.

Answer 6

Related post in SO.

My personal favorite is Asymtpote which is like MetaPost on steroids. A gallery is here.

Answer 7

Sometimes raster graphics is also necessary. I often used POV-Ray to make some illustrations.

It may be prepared with any size using the same script with description of the picture, that avoid scaling problem. But it is not a graphical editor and fast only for preparation of simple pictures.

Answer 8

Just for completeness, I'll leave this here:

It's always possible to compose your illustrations in raw postscript! Postscript is itself a Forth-like programming language. It's particularly useful for illustrations that lend themselves to being generated procedurally. If postscript itself is too low-level, one can often write a script in some other language that outputs a postscript program.

One superb introduction to producing drawings in raw postscript is this free book:

• Mathematical Illustrations by Bill Casselman.

Answer 9

For primitive drawings, I am a big fan of XFig. The UI is a little clunky, but it can save to dozens of graphics formats and creates figures that are downright trivial to include in a LaTeX document. The biggest thing for me is that the file format is text-based, so it is completely possible to script more complicated drawings.

Answer 10

I've recently been introduced to GeoGebra, and while I haven't yet had the opportunity to use for any work, I love the interface. For geometrical diagrams it looks spectacular.

I've also used XFig and gnuplot extensively. Particularly if you use $\LaTeX$, these tools serve their purpose very very well.

Answer 11

1. Software for drawing geometry diagrams
2. Sometimes I use SAGE.

Answer 12

To start with, for scientific drawing usually vector graphics is more suitable - scalable, convenient to modify and produce less bulky files.

For simple general-purpose graphics I use OpenOffice.org Draw (I prefer it to Incscape).

For abstract diagrams there is yEd - Graph Editor.

Both are free, for Win/Linux/MacOSX, easy to learn and can export to vector graphics and pdf.

Answer 13

I use TKPAINT which still works very well.

http://www.netanya.ac.il/~samy/tkpaint.html

First, one has to download ActiveTcl for Windows or its Tcl counterparts for Linux or whatever you use. It can draw filled or empty disks, ellipses, squares, rectangles, splines, rotate them, quickly copy them, move them, texts with many fonts, colors, grid, and it may be exported as EPS - encapsulated postscript as well - which is a standard way to embed similar diagrams in TeX papers on the arXiv and beyond.

I've used it in many papers when I was writing them.

Cheers LM

Answer 14

Try ConceptDraw Pro for 2D diagrams. This is what I did recently for optics:

Ray Tracing for Convex Lens

Here you can find samples for science and education illustrations.