When I used to make diagrams for papers and assignments in school, I liked using Omnigraffle (back in the good old days when my Powerbook was in operation). It was really simple, and had a lot of “stencils” with useful symbols for things like circuit diagrams. I was hoping to find something similar for Linux, and started looking around. The simplest thing I’ve found so far is OpenOffice Draw. I started putting together a little ray-tracing sketch to put into my LaTeX document. I was able to add the basic shapes, give it some color, I could even add symbols. But I couldn’t make a subscript. This is probably a small detail to most people, but it’s a show-stopper for me. So I googled around a bit, and came upon OOoLatex. I think it might help me do what I need to do – and more… I’ll have to give it a try. Part of the appeal of Omnigraffle was its ease of use, and having to add a set of macros from a independent source, just to add subscripts, seems like overkill.
I found this description of installing OOoLatex on an Ubuntu forum – it’s from 2007, but I think it will be alright.
Install dependencies:
mkdir ooolatex
cd ooolatex
Install mathematical fonts:
mkdir OOoLatexFonts
cd OOoLatexFonts
wget http://mesh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ooolatex/OOoLatexFonts.zip
unzip OOoLatexFonts.zip
cd ..
sudo mv OOoLatexFonts /usr/share/fonts/truetype/.
sudo fc-cache -f /usr/share/fonts/truetype
Install binaries for EMF – first download the emf binary from http://sourceforge.net/projects/ooolatex/files/, then
tar -xzvf latex2emf_Linux_i386_binary.tar.gz
cd latex2emf_Linux_i386_binary/
sudo ./install.sh
Install OOoLatex – download the ooolatex .oxt file for linux, then go to the directory where it was downloaded.
/usr/lib/openoffice/program/unopkg.bin add OOoLatex-4.0.0-beta-2-linux.oxt
*wow – huge GNU license agreement comes up in terminal.
Usage:
Go to View –> toolbars –> ooolatex
*sigh.
It doesn’t work in draw (but does in OpenOffice Word). That was a bit of a waste of time for me since I’d rather just go completely to Latex for my documents. I guess I still haven’t found the right diagramming software. The search continues.
*******************************************************
Ah-ha! I just found something that I think will work! http://www.skencil.org/