On Thu, 24 Apr 2008, Gour wrote:

Hi!

While writing some written assignments I have a need to draw some simple diagrams.

Tried with Dia, but it's not superb. That's why I'm thinking about learning some graphic programming language...

Anyone familiar with metapost & graphviz can write few words how the two compare?

Metapost is for drawing all kinds of graphics. It give you a very fine control on where to place objects, and is very well integrated with ConTeXt (your labels will be the same font as the rest of the document). With the new mplib, using metapost in ConTeXt is very fast (for me I do not notice any difference; with mkii it used to take aboud 3-4 sec). Graphviz is good for automatic positioning of nodes. If you have a large number of nodes, it can figure out the best way to place them. There are different versions, dot (for directed graphs), circo (for circular graphs), neato (for undirected graphs), fps (uses a different model for undirected graphs). For most of the cases, the output is average: the node placement is very good, but then it is difficult to get tex to process the labels, it is limited in terms of color effects that you can get. I find it very hard to modify the output. Graphiz does give metapost output, but I found it to be a bit akward to use. The good part about graphiz is that is very easy to learn, and for most cases the output is acceptable.

Any other suggestion?

There is dot2tex, which a python script that converts from dot (graphviz) to tikz. I have not tried it, but from the examples it appears to remove all the drawbacks of integrated graphviz with tex. It is tailored towards integration with latex, but it should not be too hard to configure it for context. Aditya

If you're on mac, you can try NodeBox. http://nodebox.net/code/index.php/Home HTH -a- On 24 Apr 2008, at 16:33, Gour wrote:

Hi!

While writing some written assignments I have a need to draw some simple diagrams.

Tried with Dia, but it's not superb. That's why I'm thinking about learning some graphic programming language...

Anyone familiar with metapost & graphviz can write few words how the two compare?

Any other suggestion?

Sincerely, Gour

--

Gour | Zagreb, Croatia | GPG key: C6E7162D ---------------------------------------------------------------- ______________________________________________________________________ _____________ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!

maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net archive : https://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ______________________________________________________________________ _____________

-------------------------------------------------- Andrea Valle -------------------------------------------------- CIRMA - DAMS Università degli Studi di Torino --> http://www.cirma.unito.it/andrea/ --> http://www.myspace.com/andreavalle --> andrea.valle@unito.it -------------------------------------------------- " Think of it as seasoning . noise [salt] is boring . F(blah) [food without salt] can be boring . F(noise, blah) can be really tasty " (Ken Perlin on noise)