I've tried it now a little. The UI looks very cool, and generally the project is cool so congrats!
However, the generated TikZ code is not good in my opinion. Everything uses absolute coordinates, which in TikZ is seldom needed.
Just to start, if I place a single node I get absolute coordinates for it. Why?
If you just write `\node {Hello};`, TikZ will put that at the center of the bounding box. No need to tell it's at `(0.5,2.91)` like it's happening in my test. Then features such as "align bottom" for a selection of multiple nodes should are manipulating the absolute coordinates instead of using TikZ's alignment features (anchors etc.).
I understand generating such code is more difficult. Maybe it can be something to point at for the next version, who knows...
I know people like it, but I hate writing TikZ manually, to the point that I've mostly moved most of my technical-ish drawings to draw.io/diagrams.net, and then just export to a PNG. I feel like it's inelegant, but it works well enough and it's easy to make something that looks ok. Generally I'm all for text-defined stuff.
I have moved some of my stuff to Mermaid when I know my stuff is going to live in Markdown but I've not tried to get that working in TeX.
That said, I would like to use TikZ just because it's kind of the idiomatic way of doing diagrams in LaTeX, so a WYSIWYG might be useful.
One suggestion, I would like the arrows to be able to "attach" to the boxes, as in the arrow endpoints can move when you move the boxes. That's how draw.io does it.
Some years ago I wired it up with `asciidoctor-diagram` so we could have simple circuits in our Asciidoc maintenance manuals. The techs loved the hell out of it, and we could collaborate on the things in a git versioned ecosystem vs whatever fresh hell the PDM/ERP had for us.
As a student I really wanted something like this. Thanks for making it open source. My theoretical computer science prof happened to be Till Tantau the inventor of TikZ. An awesome communicator too.
Looks really nice. You might consider adding some presets to make it easier to get started, like some common neural net architectures and other use cases for TikZ.
I'm running Linux Mint (xfce version), and I installed the .deb version (TikZ.Editor_0.4.0_amd64.deb). It's very odd...for example, when I open it or do File/New, many (but not all) of the grid cells are rectangles, not squares. Am I doing something wrong, like installing the wrong version? Or maybe misinterpreting what the faint grey lines are?
Oh man, good on you identifying a product that needs to exist. I've used a few TikZ editors (both online and desktop) and none of them are just amazing.
But, I've taken my papers to Typst. Could you have the agent do the same thing for Cetz, the TikZ equivalent for Typst?
This is superb. Will you consider adding support for pgfplots[1]? When I was a student I was long considering writing a native application for real-time TikZing.
At some point the people who seethe with hate for AI, and claim it's all hallucinations and illegitimate hype, are going to have to admit they were wrong. Projects like this are the proof staring them right in the face, if they care to look.
That's cool. I guess it doesn't support TikZ' relative positioning (left of etc) because WYSIWYG features like drag-and-drop require absolute positioning?
Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX
(tikz.dev)276 points by DominikPeters 6 hours ago | 56 comments
Comments
However, the generated TikZ code is not good in my opinion. Everything uses absolute coordinates, which in TikZ is seldom needed.
Just to start, if I place a single node I get absolute coordinates for it. Why? If you just write `\node {Hello};`, TikZ will put that at the center of the bounding box. No need to tell it's at `(0.5,2.91)` like it's happening in my test. Then features such as "align bottom" for a selection of multiple nodes should are manipulating the absolute coordinates instead of using TikZ's alignment features (anchors etc.).
I understand generating such code is more difficult. Maybe it can be something to point at for the next version, who knows...
I know people like it, but I hate writing TikZ manually, to the point that I've mostly moved most of my technical-ish drawings to draw.io/diagrams.net, and then just export to a PNG. I feel like it's inelegant, but it works well enough and it's easy to make something that looks ok. Generally I'm all for text-defined stuff.
I have moved some of my stuff to Mermaid when I know my stuff is going to live in Markdown but I've not tried to get that working in TeX.
That said, I would like to use TikZ just because it's kind of the idiomatic way of doing diagrams in LaTeX, so a WYSIWYG might be useful.
One suggestion, I would like the arrows to be able to "attach" to the boxes, as in the arrow endpoints can move when you move the boxes. That's how draw.io does it.
https://ctan.org/pkg/circuitikz?lang=en
https://github.com/circuitikz/circuitikz
Some years ago I wired it up with `asciidoctor-diagram` so we could have simple circuits in our Asciidoc maintenance manuals. The techs loved the hell out of it, and we could collaborate on the things in a git versioned ecosystem vs whatever fresh hell the PDM/ERP had for us.
A very nice complement to the already awesome WireViz (https://github.com/wireviz/WireViz)
How hard would it be to support cetz? I'm not touching LaTeX if I can avoid it, but I'm using Typst all the time.
But, I've taken my papers to Typst. Could you have the agent do the same thing for Cetz, the TikZ equivalent for Typst?
[1]: https://ctan.org/pkg/pgfplots?lang=en
The world thanks you.
I was quite proud of the hours of work I had put in to configure it just so, with the 3d look and all.
I'm not an AI evangelist, but this kind of thing is such a welcome boon. More itches can be scratched!
At some point the people who seethe with hate for AI, and claim it's all hallucinations and illegitimate hype, are going to have to admit they were wrong. Projects like this are the proof staring them right in the face, if they care to look.