## Drawings for Latex

Maybe many of you know many programs for drawing in Linux that allow you to embed the image in a $\LaTeX$ document and at the same time use the math typesettings of $\LaTeX$. I used to draw in Dia (dia-gnome in Ubuntu), then I devolved to xfig. Ok, lets stop here, I say devolved because I like better dia, not because I want to start a religious fight :-).

A couple of months ago Alejandro showed me a program called IPE (also in Ubuntu repositories). This program is amazing, it is easy to use (and that coming from a really bad user) and it supports $\LaTeX$ in a very friendly way, just type latex into the text fields and then with Ctrl+l you make the transition between the code and the actual drawing, you can see the way the picture looks right away and what you see is exactly what you get.

The only problem so far, I still don’t know how to change a text after typing it, but there is a solution for this (besides the brute-force approach of making the whole image from scratch). When you save the image as .ipe file, the file contains an XML that represents the image and has the source of each text, you can modify it there and then load the image into IPE again.

I’m editing the post to add the link to IPE, as Victor suggested:

http://tclab.kaist.ac.kr/ipe/