Nice font: gitlab.com/smc/fonts/Nupuram

fyi, I just found draw.io, it is nice diagrams.net/doc/faq/math-typesetting much easier to use that tikz to make charts with math in them. I find it easier than ipe also. Can download as standalone to the PC also. so I am now using. Tikz gives nice output but too much time to figure how to do some basic things in it. Draw.io looks like visio, but easier to use and has support to latex buildin which is what I was looking for. It seems easier to use than IPE also so far.

@Nasser Nobody says that you must use TikZ. I think, TikZ and PGF really can show their strength when it comes to reusing templates or plotting a lot things.

@Nasser As I commented here, the strong point of TikZ (and even picture mode...) is that you can make a document where things in the graphics change automatically together with the rest your document (labels, functions, fonts, colors, whatever). For the odd and rapid figure there are a lot of tools around, I agree.

I know tikz is nice and gives nice output and all that. But for some basic charts, it takes too much time to use as one has to program everything. I just started using draw.io and in less than 5 minutes I did this

I used a lot even xfig and xcircuit (yes!). And the first one I still use... (for circuits, now I have a quite extended collection that is easily modified, so for the day-to-day task it's easier)

in tizk it will take me may be 2 hrs :)

And I never used draw.io before in my life. Nice thing is that it has latex build in and I can export to pdf. It has good snap. so everything clicks automatically in the right grid location.

I used xfig many many years before but I think it is dead now. I also tried inkscape but did not like it. I found it hard to use.

@Nasser Now suppose that you have tens of those diagrams want to modify the generic function from F(x,y,y') to G(x,y,\dot{y}) everywhere in your document --- by using a global definition. If you are sure you will never need it, perfect, you're happy. Otherwise... you have to modify your figures one by one, hoping not to forget anyone, and the time spent will easily reverse.

@Nasser ouch, sans + serif fonts :)

Again, the right tool for the right task. I am the maintainer of circuitikz, but often I just draw a circuit by hand with xournalpp and include that in a document for my students...

@PauloCereda I noticed that. They have way to change text font

I have to play with these setting later. I am now just trying to learn how to use it to make charts. daw.io is like visio which I know very well. Here is a diagram I did with visio. I've been thinking of using tikz to do this with instead but scared to try.

@Nasser Oh yeah, comic sans 😜 (@PauloCereda)

@Nasser so why not using visio? You got a PDF and include it... (real question, not a rethorical one... is it for math support?)

@Rmano visio has terrible math support. No latex support as far as I know. Microsoft does not do Latex. I would have used visio if I could entr Latex directly in it ofcourse, but that is the main problem. so I only use visio now if I want to make something with no math in it at all like the above diagram.

same with indesign. They do not do Latex. big companies just ignore latex. They think no one need math in a diagram. I've used many commercial well know drafting programs and non has Latex support build in.

This post mentions the possible addition of an event planner to sites -> Is stackoverflow preparing for the next big siunitx party?

@Rmano if you need programatic control, naturally picture mode is the right choice; but discerning artists paint

Ok, I've compiled my first pdf and html. Can anyone guess which part of this diagram was done using draw.io and which part using tikz?

The above is not pdf, it is the actual HTML page compiled with tex4ht

@Nasser the upper (with the grey arrows and the cyan round nodes) is draw.io, the lower (with the red borders and blue edges) is tikz. why? because the alignment of the text in the nodes is more balanced.

BUT: I am not saying that you can achieve good output only with tikz. you can get very good results even with word or powerpoint.

@Nasser yes but as @Rmano says looking at one diagram misses the point. If you had a document with 1000 of those (I know you like big documents) and decide to change the math font from Stix to Cambria, would you rather change one line of tex, or re-edit 1000 documents in a graphical editor?

@JasperHabicht you are right. I've fixed that.

Nice thing is that draw.io has guide lines, where one can align things over very quickly. No need to do much manual mouse movement. it click on the grid.

@Nasser the "go to figure 6" is misaligned.

@DavidCarlisle I am not arguing that tikz is much better in terms of automation. ofcourse it is. The problem is that it takes so much time to do same thing. the lower diagram you see above took me 12 hrs to do in tikz. I try 2 cm, compile, find it is not right, try 3 cm, try again. And I change one box, I have to recode all the numbers and keep trying until they look good, until I have to add or move one box. with GUI it is so much faster and easier I find.

To each their own...

@UlrikeFischer visio has multiple alignments. i.e. one select multiple objects and can align them all in different ways. very good feature which I used it all the time. I do not know if draw.io has that yet as I just started to use it

@Nasser sure, but what I meant is that you missed to align one correctly. That is one problem with clicking: it is not easy to see if you applied a style really on every occurrence, and adjusting is time consuming too. Personally I think that figure 6 is better placed, the other text are a bit too high. So how much time would it take you to change all the blue circle to the figure 6 formatting and back again to compare both options?

@StefanKottwitz the certificate for texwelt seems to be gone again.

@Nasser No-one is saying you can't use an appropriate tool - I routinely use a GUI for my day-job as a chemist because other than very simple structures, things like ChemFig are simply too awkward

What does \ExplFileVersion do? Where can I get information about this?

Ah, found something ...

@JasperHabicht It's used to make sure we load the right files

@JosephWright Yes, I just found this. I am currently translating a doc for a package and the original dtx file uses this macro. Now I wonder how to extract this field from the sty (since the translated doc is just a regular tex file)

@JosephWright Nevermind, I think I am looking for the wrong thing anyways ...

@UlrikeFischer thank you, I renewed it. That cert renewal script drives me crazy.

@DavidCarlisle overleaf.com/blog/towards-the-future-a-new-source-editor something to look at for learnlatex?

@JosephWright yes I got cm5 working last year but cm6 was in beta and not well documented, I should look again, notably for github.com/davidcarlisle/latexcgi/issues/…

@DavidCarlisle (@UlrikeFischer, @egreg) Meanwhile:

\documentclass{article}
\let\mathdollar=$%$
\usepackage{amsmath}
\catcode`\$=\active
\makeatletter
\protected\def ${%$
  \@ifnextchar$%$
    {\grabdisplaymath}
    {\grabinlinemath}%
}
\protected\def\grabinlinemath#1${%$
  \wlog{INLINE MATH: \detokenize{#1}}%
  \mathdollar #1\mathdollar
}
\protected\def\grabdisplaymath$#1$${%$
  \wlog{DISPLAY MATH: \detokenize{#1}}%
  \[#1\]
}
\makeatother
\begin{document}

$y = mx+ c$

$$y = mx + c$$

\begin{align}
  y &= mx + c \\
  y &= ax^{2}+ bx + c\\
\end{align}

Better:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{etoolbox}
\makeatletter
\pretocmd\measure@{\wlog{DISPLAY MATH: \detokenize{#1}}}{}{}
\let\mathdollar=$%$
\catcode`\$=\active
\protected\def ${%$
  \@ifnextchar$%$
    {\grabdisplaymath}
    {\grabinlinemath}%
}
\protected\def\grabinlinemath#1${%$
  \wlog{INLINE MATH: \detokenize{#1}}%
  \mathdollar #1\mathdollar
}
\protected\def\grabdisplaymath$#1$${%$
  \wlog{DISPLAY MATH: \detokenize{#1}}%
  \[#1\]
}
\makeatother
\begin{document}

$y = mx+ c$

Everyone watching the Big Match ...?

@JosephWright USA v Iran

@DavidCarlisle Exactly

@DavidCarlisle I'm pretty sure active-$ works

@JosephWright when would you make it active though? prsesumably not in the format as \def\grabdisplaymath$#1$$ wouldn't be safe, at begin{document}?

@DavidCarlisle Indeed: I think it has to be \AtBeginDocument

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{etoolbox}
\makeatletter
\pretocmd\measure@{\wlog{DISPLAY MATH: \detokenize{#1}}}{}{}
\let\mathdollar=$%$
\begingroup
  \catcode`\$=\active
  \protected\gdef ${%$
    \@ifnextchar$%$
      {\grabdisplaymath}
      {\grabinlinemath}%
  }
  \protected\gdef\grabinlinemath#1${%$
    \wlog{INLINE MATH: \detokenize{#1}}%
    \mathdollar #1\mathdollar
  }
  \protected\gdef\grabdisplaymath$#1$${%$
    \wlog{DISPLAY MATH: \detokenize{#1}}%
    \[#1\]%
  }
\endgroup
\AtBeginDocument{%

@DavidCarlisle ^^^

@JosephWright what about nesting math? This here give inline eight messages:

\begin{align}
  y &= mx + c \\
  y &= ax^{2}+ bx + c \text{and $a=b$}\\
\end{align}

@UlrikeFischer Solvable ;)

@JosephWright good ;-)

@UlrikeFischer \let\wlog\@gobble

@DavidCarlisle that's cheating ;-). Are there packages which make $ active?

@UlrikeFischer ^^

@DavidCarlisle hyperref should be ok, it is imho only in an url.

@DavidCarlisle there are also a few with 13. E.g. this one:

\ProvidesPackage{onlyamsmath}
  [2016/12/18  v0.20  Destroy the standard math environments]

Destroy :)

$ grep '\$[ =]*13[^0-9]'  */*.sty
cleveref/cleveref.sty:      \catcode`^=13 \catcode`$=13 %$
onlyamsmath/onlyamsmath.sty:  \AtBeginDocument{\catcode`\$=13 }
protex/AlProTex.sty:   \catcode`\$=13   \catcode`\%=13   \catcode`\^=13
relenc/relenc.sty:   \lccode`\$=13\relax
rmpage/rmpage.sty:% 1/8 A8 & $13 \times 74 $ \\
xskak/xskak-nagdef.sty:\expandafter\def\csname $13\endcsname{\unclear}

I blame xskak

@DavidCarlisle tikz could get interesting. this here doesn't like an active $ at all (using the calc library):

\begin{tikzpicture}
\draw (0,0)-- ($(1,0)+(1,1)$);
\end{tikzpicture}

@mickep it has an option to destroy eqnarray ...

@UlrikeFischer Oh, then destroy is a good verb.

@UlrikeFischer I'll work on it

@DavidCarlisle it will break the parsing of NAG comments ;-(. I should reset the catcode of $ ...

@UlrikeFischer It's measuring (easy to suppress) and \mathchoice (more tricky: we'll want to think about that in tagging)

@JosephWright if you get your mathstyle then one could avoid mathchoice?

@UlrikeFischer Yup!

Staring at sub/superscripts too much lately, I wonder why are they sitting so strange, vertically, in the first image in this question.

@mickep t is bigger than x, I nearly added \strut in my answer

@DavidCarlisle Ah, yes, that must be it. But it would look better if the q and x would sit as p and t, wouldn't it? I was just a bit surprised that they were so low.

@mickep \fontdimen something kicks in when depth of superscript too close to height of subscript so it gets raised

@DavidCarlisle Yes, I do not understand that algorithm, really. Feels too complicated (I've only seen it in terms of opentype font parameters, really)

@DavidCarlisle I was testing with new parameters, and then it looks OK, but with the parameters from Latin Modern it is even worse than what is shown in the question, I'd say.

@mickep it shows up mostly in inline math as there as subscripts higher and superscripts lower but not really room for sub and super on same base

@DavidCarlisle In your answer the subindices look OK to me. Is that what you get with pdftex?

@mickep yes

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{etoolbox}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{calc}
\makeatletter
\let\mathdollar=$%$
\begingroup
  \catcode`\$=\active
  \protected\gdef ${%$
    \@ifnextchar$%$
      {\grabdisplaymath}
      {\grabinlinemath}%
  }
  \protected\gdef\grabinlinemath#1${%$
    \ifmeasuring@\else\wlog{INLINE MATH: \detokenize{#1}}\fi
    \mathdollar #1\mathdollar
  }
  \protected\gdef\grabdisplaymath$#1$${%$
    \wlog{DISPLAY MATH: \detokenize{#1}}%
    \[#1\]%
  }
\endgroup
\catcode`\#=12 %

@DavidCarlisle, @UlrikeFischer ^^^

@DavidCarlisle, @UlrikeFischer Not perfect, but workable - I think the three patches to the tests in pgf should be added anyway, as it's currently not robust against active chars properly

@JosephWright \AddToHook{env/tikzpicture/begin}{\catcode\$=3}%` it would be good to avoid that, avoiding catcode changes mid document generally the aim

@DavidCarlisle Yes, I know: I'm working on it (it's an oddity of the TikZ calc library)

@DavidCarlisle I'll work it out: mihgt need the rest of the evening!!

@DavidCarlisle So many defective tests :(

@DavidCarlisle one also would it for the \tikz command. And what about math inside nodes?

@JosephWright stressing the system with $y = mx+ c\) breaks.

@barbarabeeton I have not forgotten to answer to your email...

@UlrikeFischer Yes, it will do

@UlrikeFischer That's not really a surprise

@mickep -- not concerned; still thinking about it myself, and there's a good lead time. Thanks for the update though.

@JosephWright no, I'm only thinking about limitations.

@barbarabeeton OK, good!

@UlrikeFischer Oh, indeed

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{etoolbox}
\usepackage{tikz}
\makeatletter
\let\mathdollar=$%$
\begingroup
  \catcode`\$=\active
  \protected\gdef ${%$
    \@ifnextchar$%$
      {\grabdisplaymath}
      {\grabinlinemath}%
  }
  \protected\gdef\grabinlinemath#1${%$
    \ifmeasuring@\else\wlog{INLINE MATH: \detokenize{#1}}\fi
    \mathdollar #1\mathdollar
  }
  \protected\gdef\grabdisplaymath$#1$${%$
    \wlog{DISPLAY MATH: \detokenize{#1}}%
    \[#1\]%
  }
\endgroup
\catcode`\#=12 %
\AtBeginDocument

@DavidCarlisle, @UlrikeFischer ^^^ As promised, no catcode changes

@JosephWright ;-). Do you want to patch xskak too???