LaTeX

[gandalf013]

Most, if not all, astronomers use LaTeX to write their papers and other stuff. Recently I have been looking at various things that LaTeX and various packages can do.

LaTeX is great for writing text. What about other things such as graphics, presentations, plots, etc.? Here are some neat packages that I have found that can do a variety of things:

• Beamer is a package for making presentations. Now you can have all the consistency, WYSIWYMness, equations etc. in your presentations. It generates PDF files, which can be viewed in a PDF viewer in full-screen mode to do presentations. Using beamer, you can do movies, transitions, etc., as well.
  
• It bothered me that figures, plots and such things in most of the papers prepared using LaTeX did not quite ‘go with’ the rest of the text. Most astronomers use various plotting software to generate their plots, and then scale them to an ‘appropriate size’ to include them in their papers. That results in inconsistent fonts in figures when compared to the rest of the text. I recently found PGF and TikZ, which are great for creating graphics in LaTeX. The idea is not new: METAFONT/METAPOST, pstricks and a lot of other packages do something similar. But the ‘problem’ with them is that they generate (encapsulated) postscript files, that one needs to convert to PDF if one wants to produce PDF documents. With PGF/TikZ, one can create really nice ‘LaTeX-y’ graphics and plots directly in PDF. It also supports transparencies, color, plotting various functions through an external program, and a lot of other features.

With the two things above taken care of, I am now very happy. TikZ, and PGF in particular, are not so easy to work with, but the nice graphics produced by them is worth the effort to learn them. That does not mean that I know TikZ (and PGF in particular) well. :-)

Here is an example (simulated) HI line profile that I plotted using TikZ, and then converted it to PNG. The small image links to a higher resolution version.