Illustrating mathematics with wysiwyg tools What tools are out there for creating mathematical illustrations in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get mode?
Having struggled with tikz for several years, I've found creating figures in Omnigraffle (https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle) to be a liberating experience. (And they have good tech support.)
The webpage http://wiki.illustrating-mathematics.org/wiki/What_tools_do_we_use%3F mentions Inkscape and Illustrator; how do they compare to Omnigraffle for flexibility and ease of use?
If other people know similar systems that they like better, I'd love to know about them.
 A: I can recommend Ipe from personal experience, although it has been a few years since I've used it.
It is a little clunky, but it will dovetail with your version of LaTeX quite well. You can add preambles to pull in LaTeX packages to your figures, so you can get the fonts in your figures to match the ones in your LaTeX document, for example. You can also save and load Ipe figures in PDF format, so they are easy to include in LaTeX documents.
A: I like TikzEdt, which provides a graphical interface to edit tikz pictures. Although it is not as powerful as other graphics tools (Photoshop, Inkscape,...), for me it is the perfect combination of both worlds: you still take advantage of the tikz magic (code-based, LateX integration, ...) but also directly see what the image will look like without manually iterating through the edit - compile cycle.
(Sadly, the last update to the project was 4 years ago, so the original maintainer seems to have lost interest. But, nonetheless, it is open source.)

A: A free and easy to use software is GeoGebra. After drawing your figure, go to File option and select export as tikz. I personally don't like $\LaTeX$ output of GeoGebra because its generated codes are (long and) not professional, although it draw figures anyway.
A: I used Mayura Draw to create approximately 100 illustrations for the second edition of my book on Lipschitz algebras, and I was really happy with it.
A: If you're on a Mac, I can highly recommend Intaglio. It is one of the tools I use on a daily basis, almost as essential to my workflow as LaTeX. The key feature that makes this so worthwhile to me is that I can throw in any vector graphics object (from Mathematica, from LaTeXit, ...), and it will allow me to edit it without any complaint, and combine with bitmap images if I choose to. I was never able to achieve this level of flexibility with Illustrator.
I recall my pre-Intaglio days, when I would struggle trying to teach Mathematica to produce publication quality plots with LaTeX compatible fonts. With the combination of Intaglio and LaTeXit this is now a problem from the past.
The program has been in a steady state for many years, so don't expect new features, but I am happy with the features it has and there are regular new releases to keep up with changes in the Mac operating system.
At $89 it is value for money.
