Re: [O] Best way to make/add tech diagrams/graphics?

[Nick Dokos]

Lawrence Bottorff <address@hidden> writes:

> I'd like to embed images into my running org file -- for eventual
> conversion to Latex or html. These would be simple diagram-style
> pictures such as math or technical diagrams that cannot be done with
> gnuplot or other formula-to-picture conversion software. 
>
> Examples:
> http://www.library.utoronto.ca/see/SEED/Vol5-1/Queiroz_Emmeche_El-Hani_files/image003.gif
> http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/irvine/SBGN_process_description_cropped.jpg
>
> I know emacs can draw some things, but I'd probably need better
> renditions. So how does emacs/org handle such images and what sort of
> software (I'm on Ubuntu) is available for making such drawings and
> diagrams? What about software like "Processing"? Having Processing
> code embedded that then produced images would be great.
>

There is a myriad of graphics programs on Linux: graphviz/dot, ditaa,
plantuml, tikz, gimp, inkscape... There are many more. Some are general,
some are more specialized. Russell mentioned Visio but afaik that's
Windows only. Processing Processing code through a babel process should
be entirely processable too :-)

Once you produce output in some format (png, jpeg, svg, postscript -
whatever your emacs is capable of showing through the image.el
package[fn:1]), you can add a link to it in your org file. Then you can
toggle inline images on or off with C-c C-x C-v (or C-u C-c C-x C-v if
you have captions). Fundamentally, that's it - but of course, people
have been coming up with streamlined ways to do all that (e.g. Max M's
org-screenshot to take the most recent example).

Footnotes:

[fn:1] Mine can do png, jpeg, svg, xpm, but not postscript, even though
image-type-available-p says that it *is* available - there are other
formats that should also work, but that I have not tried: gif, pbm, xbm,
bmp, tiff. Not sure why postscript does not work for me.  On linux, the
various image types require that emacs be built with the various
libraries. On Windows, I think they are dynamically loaded, if present.

-- 
Nick