Ratings and Reviews
Community Rating
Average Rating: 5.0/5.0Number of Ratings: 3Number of Reviews: 1
My Review of PGF and TikZ |
||
| You have not rated or reviewed this project.Click below to rate/review. | My Rating: | |
| New Review | ||
Most Helpful Reviews
This is one of the finest libraries available for LaTeX which also works wonderfully even in plain TeX(!). The main advantage of this over something like Asymptote is its tight integration with TeX; you can simply write your commands in-line, and declare parameterised macros which can draw different shapes depending on the input.
Drawing even the most complex diagrams becomes a breeze with TikZ, and if you want raw performance, dropping down to PGF (also called the "basic layer") is not as daunting as you would expect. Unfortunately, the syntax is completely different (but feels more "TeXy"), so it will often involve rewriting the entire series drawing commands. Luckily, even the raw drawing commands are surprisingly high-level.
One of the main advantages of PGF (and TikZ) is that it's extremely composable (provided you apply some thought and care in writing down your commands); you can group things together and apply transformations on them in bulk, which is extremely fast because it translates to the native drawing commands of the target backend (which can be native PDF, PS etc). The files generated are very small and completely vector-based, which means the file size will drop significantly if you were using a bitmap drawings program before.
The library is extremely polished and well-done; it is also very complete: it comes with many predefined useful shapes which can be parameterised easily. There's even a rather complete parser for arithmetic expressions to do calculations (for calculating coordinates and such). The only disadvantage I've found so far is that it's *so* big, that it's easy to get lost in the huge manual!
Most Recent Reviews
This is one of the finest libraries available for LaTeX which also works wonderfully even in plain TeX(!). The main advantage of this over something like Asymptote is its tight integration with TeX; you can simply write your commands in-line, and declare parameterised macros which can draw different shapes depending on the input.
Drawing even the most complex diagrams becomes a breeze with TikZ, and if you want raw performance, dropping down to PGF (also called the "basic layer") is not as daunting as you would expect. Unfortunately, the syntax is completely different (but feels more "TeXy"), so it will often involve rewriting the entire series drawing commands. Luckily, even the raw drawing commands are surprisingly high-level.
One of the main advantages of PGF (and TikZ) is that it's extremely composable (provided you apply some thought and care in writing down your commands); you can group things together and apply transformations on them in bulk, which is extremely fast because it translates to the native drawing commands of the target backend (which can be native PDF, PS etc). The files generated are very small and completely vector-based, which means the file size will drop significantly if you were using a bitmap drawings program before.
The library is extremely polished and well-done; it is also very complete: it comes with many predefined useful shapes which can be parameterised easily. There's even a rather complete parser for arithmetic expressions to do calculations (for calculating coordinates and such). The only disadvantage I've found so far is that it's *so* big, that it's easy to get lost in the huge manual!