On Mon, 18 Feb 2019 18:47:49 +0100
Gour
I use TikZ when I need some ready-made stuff with possibly some fancy shading patterns (or when I would pass the images to LaTeX users). In those cases you might be able to achive the same in a lot less lines of code, but you usually constantly need the user manual at hand, and doing something low level is more tricky. ConTeXt support might be occasionally broken.
Thank you. It seems that metaPost/Fun is a way to go...
MetaPost is native to luatex (MPlib is integrated). TikZ was designed for latex, although it has always made a great effort to remain open to context. Nevertheless, it does calculations in TeX, hardly ideal. Furthermore, MP solves (linear) equations which is very, very useful in creating drawings. If MetaPost is "missing" any higher-level functionality, it is only because macros and packages have not been written for it, or distributed, for many exist. Sure, TikZ can provide lots more eye candy, pfluff I believe is what Tufte calls it. Alan