What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) for PGF/TikZ?

Question

I was wondering if there is anything similar to LyX for PGF/TikZ (e.g. a high-level WYSIWYG editor or code generator for PGF/TikZ).

If there is no WYSIWYG editor for this tandem, is there one that allows to easily generate PGF/TikZ templates organized by categories, etc.)

If not, what would be the closest to this idea? Do people mostly code their PGF/TikZ graphics from scratch?

Answer 1

There is ktikz (also available in the qtikz version), which seems not only run on Linux/KDE but also on Windows.

Version 0.10 is released. This version is available as an Ubuntu package for Lucid, as a Debian package for Squeeze and as a Windows installer (a patch release 0.10.1 is available). For Linux there are two versions available: KtikZ and QtikZ. KtikZ is integrated with the KDE4 platform, whereas QtikZ has the traditional Qt-only interface.

I personally use latexmk -pdf -pvc to keep recompiling my TikZ diagram file after every saved edit. I use a dedicated file for every diagram which uses the standalone class (which I wrote just for this very purpose). If you use a PDF viewer with auto-reload like evince then the changes are shown directly (after each save). I had issues getting latexmk reloading PDFs in the Adobe Reader.

Answer 2

May be Tikzedt (works on windows and linux) is what you are looking for.

TikZ/PGF is a pair of widely used languages for creating vector graphics, in particular in Latex documents. There are a couple of editors assisting in the creation of TikZ code. However, mostly one has the choice between a text editor with preview, with no WYSIWYG capabilities, and a true WYSIWYG editor with a TikZ export function, without direct code access. Combining both direct code editing and WYSIWYG features is quite involved, since it requires a parser and interpreter that "understands" the TikZ code so that it can be rendered and edited in a WYSIWYG manner. We recently wrote such an editor, TikzEdt. This article describes the main programming challenges we faced, and design decisions we made to overcome them. Furthermore, there are some components of our program that can be reused for similar applications.

Another option could be jpgfdraw

Answer 3

There are many programs that can export Pgf or TikZ code of diagrams or pictures generated there. For example

• Geogebra is a geometry software that can export nice TikZ code.
• Dia is a diagram design software that exports Pgf code.
• Inkscape is a vector drawing software (similar to Corel Draw) has a plugin to export TikZ code

A full list of this can be found in the TeXample page.

As Martin Scharrer said, there is also kTikZ/QtikZ which compiles TikZ code in realtime and previews it in a window. It works under KDE and also in Windows.

Answer 4

The editor you're looking for is TpX. It doesn't seem to have been worked on in awhile but I use it all the time and it's really great. It exports a file with it's internal information appearing as % comments for TeX with tikz code beneath - it will even enclose it in a figure environment, so you just include the .tpx file and the LaTeX compiler does the rest.

You can find it at: http://tpx.sourceforge.net/