Graphical tools
From Robin
Contents |
Figures / Illustrations
- Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop - for students only through UiO programkiosk?
- Inkscape
- Gimp
- Directly in LaTeX (PGF/TikZ: https://github.com/pgf-tikz/pgf; some examples)
- Lucid charts
- Powerpoint, Keynote, …
- Google draw, in Google disk
- Blender
- Photopea (online editor)
- Figma?
- Draw.io
- Linux-program for grafer, finn ut navn
Plotting, Graphs
- Python
- Matplotlib (see Mouret's tutorial for publication quality plots )
- Seaborn (easy to create good looking plots, uses Matplotlib internally, see for example tutorial here)
- Export to LaTeX (PGF/TikZ; https://github.com/nschloe/tikzplotlib)
- R
- ggplot2 (with Rstudio)
- Export to LaTeX (PGF/TikZ; https://github.com/daqana/tikzDevice)
- Matlab (available at uio)
- Export to Latex (PGF/TikZ; https://github.com/matlab2tikz/matlab2tikz)
- Octave (free alternative to matlab)
- Export to LaTeX (PGF/TikZ; https://github.com/matlab2tikz/matlab2tikz)
- Gnuplot (free)
- Desmos.com (web based)
- javaFX
- excel (uio)
Digitalize Figures
To qualitatively compare one's own data with other published data, it is sometimes needed to obtain the concrete data of the respective publication. In that case there are multiple ways to do that:
- Python: https://github.com/dilawar/PlotDigitizer
- Matlab: https://blogs.mathworks.com/steve/2013/12/31/automating-data-extraction-1/
- External App: WebPlotDigitizer
How to Export Figures
- before saving the graphics in the respective programs
- check colour maps (see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19160-7 or https://matplotlib.org/stable/tutorials/colors/colormaps.html)
- check font size, font type and line widths
- preferably use vector graphics such as svg, pdf or eps (editable with vector graphics editors)
- avoid bitmap graphics if possible and especially jpg!
- For LaTeX
- recommended approach: export as pdf, use pdfcrop
- epstopdf - usually installed with LaTeX
- pdfcrop - usually installed with LaTeX
- for direct inclusion in LaTeX use the scripts linked above to create PGF/TikZ files
- sometimes it is neccessary to use png format (e.g. in case of render graphics or plots with an essential transparency effect)
- in that case one should pick a proper resolution for the export file while accounting for its file size
- possible ways to compress the png file is to use for example pngquant, AdvanceCOMP or ImageMagick
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