chemical laboratory equipment

Question

I want to include some drawings with Erlenmeyer flask, Bunsen burner and so on in LaTeX.

I browsed the texample.net gallery. I found some examples for chemical structures, molecules and so. But I did not find any example for lab equiment.

• Does TikZ provide a library that helps to construct this?
• Are there any other TikZ sites where I can find examples?
• Does anybody had a similar task and found a solution to share?

I am not fixed on TizK. Are there other means to make this drawings? I looked at pst-labo. How difficult would it be to extend the options it provides?

Any suggestions are welcoome.

Answer 1

This may not be exactly for what you're looking, but it sounds like there are no pre-built packages that do exactly what you need. My suggestion would be to find some high quality vector images for the lab equipment (openclipart.org has some excellent examples) and then use that as clip art inside a TikZ picture, which you could also integrate into the aforementioned TikZ examples. One approach to do that is to convert the SVG images from openclipart.org directly into TikZ code. The easiest way to do this of which I know is to load the images into Inkscape and then use this patch. An alternative approach is to convert the SVG images to PDFs (which can also be done in Inkscape) and then inserting them into your TikZ picture as nodes. For example:

\node (flask) at (0,0) {\includegraphics[width=1cm]{flask.pdf}};