User friendly software for math drawings

Question

I am a math grad student and these days I am writing my thesis using $\LaTeX$. I have to use few 2D graphs that contain curves and shaded regions with few labeling. Can anybody please recommend me a user friendly free software that I can use to draw my figures?

It shouldn't be hard with pstricks or tikz-pgf. You'll have a better integration to your document than with an external software. — Bernard, Jun 25 '19 at 21:39
I always used Mathematica with the Save As... functionality. Save to pdf, then include the pdf in your document. — Adrian Keister, Jun 25 '19 at 21:41
Another vote for Mathematica, which I have used exclusively for several books, including the book I'm writing now. — David G. Stork, Jun 25 '19 at 21:48
along with the other recommendations, take a quick look at draw.io, might be of some help. — QuasarChaser, Jun 26 '19 at 03:41

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 26 '19 at 02:25

3

I’d look into Tikz, which is a package for LaTeX. It’s fairly intuitive if you’ve used LaTeX before and I think (based on your description) it’s good for what you’re going for.

Here’s a link to an Overleaf page describing some of its basic functionality:

There’s obviously more you can do with it (I recently used it/an extension of it to draw circuits for a Laplace transform paper I wrote), so you can do some more googling to find what you think you need out of it. Good luck!

edited Jun 26 '19 at 02:25

xrfxlp

1,505

answered Jun 25 '19 at 21:43

scoopfaze

976

3

+1 with modifications. I find tikz very useful but with a steep learning curve. So what I do is find some code that does as much as possible of what I want, try to modify it (cargo cult programming, I'm afraid), then ask politely at tex stackexchange for help. I always get it. – Ethan Bolker Jun 25 '19 at 21:57
@EthanBolker: from my point of view, pstricks has the advantage to use LaTeX syntax, so the learning curve is not so steep. Furthermore, it is well documented, with many examples, and the documentation has a sensible size. – Bernard Jun 25 '19 at 22:06

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 21 '20 at 09:03

Tikz is a great choice, but not very user-friendly (i suppose same goes for asymptote).

I would recommend Geogebra if you want something more user friendly or WYSIWYG type. Besides, one could draw in geogebra and then export it to tikz/pstricks.

One big advantage of tikz over graphic softwares is styles. But, one can draw in geogebra, export it to tikz, and then incorporate tikz styles (by editing tikz code). There are other things in tikz one cannot hope to achieve in a drawing software (eg: markings on line/curve in tikz).

User friendly software for math drawings

2 Answers2