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What tools do you usually use to draw graphical models in research papers? I mostly use tikz, but it's sometimes a bit labor-intensive getting everything to come out right (and I've had reinstalls/upgrades of texlive/pgf break all the figures in a paper, which was annoying). Some other options I can think of are Dia, Inkscape, graphviz, and Mathematica (but these last two might need a bit of hand holding)> |
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I've always been a big fan of xfig. No fuss, but still everything you want in a schematic diagram drawing program. The UI is kind of old school, but whatever, it works. 2
Agreed. The xfig UI seems archaic but it actually is really good. I can draw really quickly with it compared to Inkscape and Illustrator.
(Sep 03 '10 at 08:05)
Noel Welsh
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On Mac OS, you can actually just use Keynote (the PowerPoint equivalent). Just draw on a slide. It works really well for me. You can export your drawing as PDF vector graphic. Just select and copy, open Preview, do "Insert from Clipboard" and save as PDF. Of course, if your graph is too large to draw by hand or you need automatic layout, then graphviz is the better alterntive. |
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I found the TutorialGMLTX tutorial and template (which uses Latex) to be quite handy. Note: One element that I required, which was not covered in the included tutorial, was a dotted arc/edge. For that, you can pass the "linestyle=dotted" option to psline, as described in this PSTricks documentation. |
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I just heard of nodebox yesterday. http://nodebox.net/code/index.php/Home It's free and supposed to be good. |
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I usually use a combination of OmniGraffle (which uses graphviz under the hood) and LaTeXiT, a Mac application that creates transparent PDFs from LaTeX math markup. Then I get the full power of LaTeX for labeling the figure. I usually turn off the automatic shadows though (they usually look terrible in print). |
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If you're already comfortable with tikz, there are some good macros written by Laura Dietz. They allow template representations, generative models, directed models, factor graph notation, etc. |
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Try the pstricks package com.braju.graphicalmodels from http://www1.maths.lth.se/matstat/staff/hb/mypackages/ |
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Try the pstricks package com.braju.graphicalmodels from http://www1.maths.lth.se/matstat/staff/hb/mypackages/ |
TpX is the one I have been using. It is not perfect, but it is simple for drawing graphical models.