On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 1:50 PM, <sta...@cs.tu-berlin.de> wrote: > But then you need to through it to pgf and tex and whether they as > dependences make much sense…
Indeed, that's a messy overhead. > I have used it several times for different purposes but not so often. > Every time I get back to it, I find myself “relearning” things I had > already knew last time. I don't always have time for practice a lot -- > for these cases I feel a graphical front is useful. > Well, the front end is your text editor. (See downsides of this below.) > Me too, for some cases: it particularly pays off for well defined basic > figures when you know their relative positions in beforehand and you > don't need the visual feedback for; and for repeating modular drawings > as well. However, for free form curves and prototyping, it becomes an > ugly endless mess of adjust-compile-view cycles. It all pretty much boils down to the same issue: just as you said, it's not possible to learn TikZ in a blink of an eye. However, if you master TikZ (f.e. by using it on a daily basis), there'd be no need for any adjust-compile-view cycles (or at least not as much). In the end it's a question about convenience, I guess. It's the same with programming... either you program C in vi and compile/link by hand (adjusting/re-compiling until it works) or you use Java and Eclipse with all the fancy auto-completion features etc.
