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Re:Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research? by godelski on Saturday June 15, 2019 @05:17PM (#20192208)
> matplotlib

And now a problem that would be great to solve is having vectored images and being able to change my fonts on size, lines are too small, I changed the paper format, whatever. I can't express how often I've had to redo plots simply because they don't look right in a paper.

I also cannot express the beauty of LaTeX but the absolute horror it is to create Tikz images. They are beautiful but it is definitely an art that one can never master. I want to do it with code, I don't want dumb gui interfaces that only work on certain machines and never work as expected.

If a nicer version of Tikz could be made that had a lot of power under the hood was created, this would help a lot of people. That's why matplotlib is so great. To do basic things is extremely straightforward. But if you want to do extremely complex things you also have that power. (Even something as simple as matplotlib for LaTeX - which results in vectored images - would be incredibly helpful)

Re:Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research? by gpoore on Sunday June 16, 2019 @08:23AM (#20195132)
Check out matplotlib's PGF backend: https://matplotlib.org/users/pgf.html
Re:Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research? by godelski on Sunday June 16, 2019 @12:46PM (#20196421)
This is pretty nice and I will likely be using it from now on. Thanks.

But I do want something a little more native to latex. The major issue is that sometimes font sizes, axes, titles, even plot thickness doesn't look right in a paper. The issue is when you have a large plot and have to replot to fix these things. But vectored images will help.