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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.

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  • $\begingroup$ I have heard someone recommend ipe and inkscape. Not sure if either can export into tikz or anything else that fits into the TeX file, though. Haven't used them myself -- gotten by with tikz copypasted from tex.stackexchange... $\endgroup$
    – darij grinberg
    Commented Feb 28, 2018 at 17:13
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    $\begingroup$ Good old xfig is still a force to be reckoned with. Its LaTeX capabilities are rather rudimentary but not non-existent, and well-documented in several places. A drawback is that on an MS operating sytem, one needs some 'virtualization' to simulate a unix-like environment. $\endgroup$
    – Peter Heinig
    Commented Feb 28, 2018 at 17:27
  • $\begingroup$ I love xfig (on linux/unix/mac). I'd say its LaTeX capabilities are actually not bad at all (I recently learned how to export as PDF+LaTeX, allowing LaTeX fonts to be used in figures in a straightforward way). Two particularly nice features (maybe basic) are the "group" mode to group a number of objects into a single object that can then be copied - great for recursive figures! - and a layer feature, so that the diagram is composed of superposed layers, each of which can be independently edited. All of this is quite intuitive and easy to use. $\endgroup$
    – Anthony Quas
    Commented Feb 28, 2018 at 17:45
  • $\begingroup$ PS: xfig on a mac is a bit of an adventure: you have to install XQuartz (a mac version of the linux XWindows), something called fink (a package that compiles linux code to run on a mac), and then finally you can use fink to install xfig. Once this is done, I find it to be reasonably stable. $\endgroup$
    – Anthony Quas
    Commented Feb 28, 2018 at 18:00
  • $\begingroup$ I use EazyDraw (for Mac), eazydraw.com, using LaTeXiT for formulas (chachatelier.fr/latexit/latexit-home.php?lang=en). $\endgroup$
    – Ira Gessel
    Commented Mar 1, 2018 at 13:47

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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.

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  • $\begingroup$ I should add that I've used Inkscape before although not for mathematical figures. I found it to be a bit of a pain. Perhaps it has improved in the interim, though. $\endgroup$
    – James Smith
    Commented Feb 28, 2018 at 18:00
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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.)

screenshot

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  • $\begingroup$ Ktikz provides similar functionality for linux users. $\endgroup$
    – Pablo Lessa
    Commented Jan 8, 2019 at 14:30
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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.

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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.

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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.

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