How would I trace a pixelated graphic for my thesis?

Question

I am writing a thesis with MS Word about drug delivery and I have a graphic that is a bit pixelated (so says the professor). I heard that TeX is a good thing to learn for this and I was wondering if anybody knows how I could improve my image.

Answer 1

UPDATE: As JohnReed helpfully pointed out, you may want to change the "article" class to the "standalone" class in order to size the resulting pdf to the tikz picture. This also removes the page number from the output.

I think I can help you out with this. I would also recommend that you write long documents in XeLaTeX and avoid MS Word (unless you are a pro in Word), because it will save you time in the long run. Anyway, I had a look at your drawing and from what I can tell, its no problem with the TikZ package. Try this in your tex editor (and compile with xelatex):

\documentclass[12pt]{article} %  say
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{arrows,decorations.pathmorphing,backgrounds,positioning,fit,petri,decorations.pathreplacing}
\usepackage{fixltx2e}%get textsubscript working
\usepackage{xltxtra}
\usepackage{xunicode}
\setmainfont{Times New Roman}                    %pick the font used in paragraphs
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}[thick]
    %MAIN STRUCTURE OF GRAPHIC
    \draw[very thick,blue] (0,0) -- (0,10) node[midway, left=4pt,black] {16G}node[midway,right=45pt,black] {24G};
    \draw[very thick,blue] (4,10) -- (4,7.5) -- (8,7.5);
    \draw[very thick,blue] (4,0) -- (4,5) -- (8,5);
    \draw[blue] (0,8.5)--(1,7)--(1,0);
    \draw[blue] (4,8.5)--(3,7)--(3,0);
    \draw[blue,dashed] (1,0) -- (1,-1);
    \draw[blue,dashed] (3,0)--(3,-1);
    %ARROWS
    \draw[<-,red] (2,9)--(2,11)node[above=4pt,black] {Na-Alginate + Bio-compound (F\textsubscript{L})};
    \draw[<-,red]  (6,6.3)--(9,6.3)node[right=4pt,black] {Sterile airflow (F\textsubscript{a})};
    \draw[->,red,dotted] (4,-.5) -- (6,-.5)node[ right=4pt,black] {Retractable Nozzle};
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

Also, I put in there \setmainfont{Times New Roman} because you are using MS Word to write your thesis and suppose that is the font you are likely using for your document (although I recommend CMU Serif Roman). You can change the font name in the curly braces to any installed system font. Thats the beauty of XeLaTeX!

Answer 2

I can recommend Open/LibreOffice Draw for drawing this type of figure. Enabling snap-to-grid, it is easy to draw straight lines. While tikz and PSTricks can produce nice output as well, it takes more time to get exactly what you want.

For inclusion in a (La)TeX document, you can export the selection to EPS (and convert to PDF with epstopdf when you use PDF(La)TeX). For inclusion into a Word document, I think EMF gives the best results.

Answer 3

Well, LaTeX would especially be helpful if you would want to write the whole thesis with it (I would definitely recommend it). If you just want this graphic to be sharper, use CorelDraw or Inkscape. Lerning TeX just to convert this graphics makes no sense (Check PSTricks 2D Examples for nice examples).