# What is a good way to draw Dynkin diagrams in LaTeX?

I'm about to start writing something up which includes a fair number of Dynkin diagrams, and I can think of several ways of going about it:

• Just draw the darn things in, e.g., InkScape, and include the graphics in the standard way.

• Hack them together using the picture environment or tikz, as this person suggests.

• Abuse the feynmf package, possibly with defining new kinds of "propagator" lines.

Anybody have experience with this sort of task?

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I would not recommend abusing the feynmf package. In the past I have used the picture environment (with the eepic package) to do precisely this.

Table 6.2 in page 185 of these lecture notes (PDF file), I typeset the Dynkin diagrams using the picture environment. I'm happy to make the code available. Here's a sample for the $A_n$ Dynkin diagram:

\begin{picture}(50,7)
\multiput(5,1)(10,0){5}{\circle{2}}
\multiputlist(10,1)(10,0)%
{{\line(1,0){8}},{\line(1,0){8}},{$\cdots$},{\line(1,0){8}}}
\multiputlist(5,3)(10,0){$\scriptscriptstyle 1$,%
$\scriptscriptstyle 2$,$\scriptscriptstyle 3$,%
$\scriptscriptstyle \ell{-}1$,$\scriptscriptstyle \ell$}
\end{picture}


The diagram is decorated with a labelling of the nodes, by the way.

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 Actually, this only uses the epic package, not the eepic package. – José Figueroa-O'Farrill Jul 27 '10 at 18:55

I typically use tikz. I like tikz because I find it relatively straight-forward. Also, because my interest is in representation theory and quivers I have to create many other diagrams beyond Dynkin diagrams and tikz allows me to use a single language to create all of them and the resulting graphics have a consistent style (arrow heads, line thickness, etc).

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 I like tikz a lot, too. There's a great site that has a lot of examples, though no Dynkin Diagrams (yet!): texample.net/tikz/examples – Suppressingfire Jul 27 '10 at 20:56