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I Program My Graphics Almost as Fast as I Draw Them
The tricks I use to create TikZ figures efficiently so they don’t take more time than drawing “by hand”
I’m a big fan of programming my technical graphics. As a tech worker, I’m required to produce a lot of those. Graphics programming can have a lot of advantages over simply drawing the figures in a visual application. Perhaps the biggest drawback to this approach, though, is that it requires more effort and time.
I have produced many technical graphics over the years, both for my grad school publications and slide decks, as well as my work reports and presentations. Over time, I built an arsenal of tricks to make the experience smoother and retain the quality of programmed vector graphics with the speed of visually-drawn graphics.
For my graphics programming, I use a LaTeX library called PGF/TikZ, which allows me to embed my graphics directly in a LaTeX document, but can also produce standalone figures. I wrote about how I use it in a previous article:
