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I would like to ask if anyone has any experience creating figures in latex for scientific papers and would like to know what libraries are useful to achieve this. If latex cannot be used then what?

moewe
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Shane Gervais
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1 Answers1

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As the question is quite general - and in a way a good question to summarise what is available out there - I share which packages I use making my papers. Mind you: apart from some general packages, there is also a personal preference in the choices involved.

Bibliography

  1. biblatex and its recommended companion packages csquotes and xpatch. I use Zotero with the Better BibTex addon as reference software and export .bib libraries from there to be used in my .tex files

Drawing (general)

  1. TikZ / PGF as it is a very versatile package in creating all kind of figures, plots and whatnot.

  2. pgfplots as a specialised package to draw 2D/3D plots. It is based on pgfobviously.

Drawing (chemistry specific)

  1. endiagram and modiagram are two packages also based on pgf that are specialised in drawing energy diagrams and molecular orbital diagrams respectively. To be used in chemistry related articles.

  2. chemfig draws organic compound structures and again based on pgf

  3. chemmacros used to print chemical formulas and projection figures like Newman. It also uses pgf, but has a few important (seperate) companion packages:

  4. chemformula to typeset the formulas properly,

  5. chemgreek to define a Greek character set to be used in chemmacros

  6. chemnum to annotate structures and formulas so they can be used as reference labels.

There obviously are a lot more packages available depending on the scientific area you are working in. As I am involved in teaching - or better educating - students in chemistry, my choices are based on that area.

There is an older question containing a list of packages used to create graphics. You can find that list here: What graphics packages are there for creating graphics in LaTeX documents?

alchemist
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