Wednesday, October 20, 2010

The "tikzDevice" package

The tikzDevice package is quite amazing. Here are two graphs I just made, with (lower) and without (upper) using the tikzDevice package. The difference in quality is huge.

Since the LaTeX source file for the figure is quite large in size and may take significantly longer to compile, it makes sense to export the file into PDF file and include in the main LaTeX file in the usual way. That way, one gets the pleasing effect produced by TikZ and does not suffer from longer compilation time.

Also, the package "pgfSweave" is also very helpful if one wants to combine R sessions with LaTeX session.

Here is a tikz editor that works great on my 32-bit Ubuntu box but cannot be compiled on my 64-bit box. It can produce PDF, EPS, and PNG files directly from LaTeX code. TpX is another editor for tikz. It is currently Windows-only but a alpha version based on Lazarus is under development.

Some additional information is provided by this post.

3 comments:

Wade said...

I like the top one better, maybe it is because that is what I am used to. But maybe the files sizes are quite different?

Shige said...

The top one does not blend well with LaTeX, and it looks different from the original X11 graphic display. The second one actually looks more like the original X11 display.

Shige said...

The first one is a pdf file with size about 200k while the second one is a TeX file with size about 800k.

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