Drawing Postscript Figures

[timo]

I want to add a sketch on a binary tree-structure to a scientific publication. I´d like to draw the sketch more or less directly in postscript of pdf format so that I don´t have to worry about how it looks when it is rescaled later. The functions I´d need are

- Drawing a circle

- Draving lines connecting them

- A few dots would be nice but are not nessecary

- Rectangles would be nice, too

- Text and greek letters

 

Does anyone by chance know a good freeware WYSIWYG editor that I can use to do that? Freeware is important, easy installation also is (so preferrably a windows prog), WYSIWYG is also nessecary because otherwise I could as well use the TeX drawmode.

[mooeypoo]

Microsoft Office Visio is not free, but it does that (if I understood what you're asking) very well. It can also export to WEB application, with or without javascript.

 

As for a free version, I've looked up similarities, and this is what I came up with (I didn't test them):

 

 

http://www.softpile.com/Business/Applications/Review_17518_index.html

http://argouml.tigris.org/

http://www.techsoup.org/products/downloads.cfm

 

hope it helps

 

~moo

[Dave]

Personally I'd just suggest LaTeX (possibly with something like pstricks, or the xypic package) but as you've specified you want WYSIWYG, I don't really know. Somewhat of a useless post, but oh well

[Aeternus]

I think XFig (or WinFig?? for windows) does most of that although the interface is a bit clunky imo (can definitely output in a variety of postscript derived formats and also into various latex usables formats).

 

I personally think Inkscape is quite well done. It's not specifically designed for what you want (it's just a general vector graphics app) but you can include greek characters using it's unicode support (just press ctrl+u and then type the unicode sequence for that character, or just copy that character in from another application - Inkscape Manual Ref - Unicode Character Code Charts). It does circles and connectors (so if you move the circle the line follows etc) and you can curve connectors and lots of other things. It also saves to .ps, .eps and it seems to save to LaTeX with pstricks as well.

[timo]

Thanks for the suggestions. The matter (of drawing the diagram I was thinking about) is currently set back due to more important issues at hand but I will check back to your suggestions in case I decide to add the diagram.