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Till now I mostly used Origin to create scientific plots for my documents but have recently decided to learn a vector graphics language which enables me to produce more beautiful looking plots with LaTeX. The search came down to the usual suspect TikZ/PGF and Asymptote. I'm inclined to decide for Asymptote because as far as I can see both languages are capable of nearly everything when it comes to plotting functions and data in 2D but Asymptote seems to have better 3D capabilities (i.e. interactive 3D plots are quite interesting). So much for my situation and state of knowledge.

My question arises from my inability to find examples produced with Asymptote that include plot-matrices (I'm not sure whether this is the official name or not. I mean several plots stacked above and/or beside one another.). With PGF/TikZ this can be achieved by using the groupplots library as can be seen in the answer to this question. As I need to make those plots rather frequently I need to know whether Asymptote is easily capable of producing those plots or not. If it would be very complicated to create such plots then I might be better off with PGF/TikZ. Thanks for your help.

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This is just a personal point of view, but I prefer PGF/TikZ over Asymptote. I tried out Asymptote a couple of years earlier or so and at the time (I don't know what the current situation is) it was not well integrated with LaTeX and it took several compile runs before I could actually see the figure in the document. Beside, the figure was not rendered properly in Adobe Reader. TikZ is somewhat verbose and comparatively slow, but the "fan base" is significantly larger as far as I can tell and I find it extremely powerful. – Count Zero Sep 17 '11 at 18:10
@CountZero: I have no work experience with either of them, just looked at the documentations and some examples and played a bit around, so I'm open to suggestions. I just had the impression Asymptote might offer better 3D functionality than PGF/TikZ. I can think of some neat things for which I could use interactive 3D Plots but on the other hand I would use it mostly for normal 2D data plots and graphics, so this functionality might not be necessary. Do you happen to know whether there will be some extensions to PGF/TikZ concerning 3D plots in the near future (i.e. handling invisible lines)? – Philipp Sep 17 '11 at 18:49
That's right, TikZ has no support for "true" 3D. Ironically, the interactive 3D figures were precisely the ones that did not work for me when I tried Asymptote... :) Since I don't really need 3D functionality right now (I use TikZ mostly to draw electric circuits and plots imported from Matlab), I don't really think about switching. Unfortunately I have no idea about the upcoming improvements of TikZ... Maybe some more experienced and better informed Tex.SX member can hint at something? – Count Zero Sep 17 '11 at 19:19
Maybe you want to take a look at this post: What Are the Advantages of TikZ/PGF-over PSTricks?. It's probably not exactly what you want, but some good points about TikZ are made. – Count Zero Sep 17 '11 at 19:24
@CountZero: Thanks for the hint. It's quite interesting. I had considered PSTricks as another option and the pst-solides3d package seems to provide quite good solutions for 3D objects, but as I usually use pdftex to compile my documents TikZ is preferable I guess. I would need a good 3D support for creating vector graphics of molecules and molecular surfaces. The molecular viewer programs (Avogadro and Molekel) I use at the moment only provide png-images. – Philipp Sep 17 '11 at 20:15

closed as not a real question by lockstep, Joseph Wright♦ Nov 5 '11 at 21:59

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