Graphics in papers

I have always wondered with what programs do people do their graphics when they publish papers. They most of the time seem to be embedded in some way as vector graphics, I'd say, as when I try to zoom the pdf it seems it computes the image in the moment, it doesn't seem to be a image. From their aspect they don't seem to be just print screens of Mathematica plots.

Here are some examples of what I mean:

Anyone knows what should I use to be able to do similar graphics?

(I've put a latex tag as I believe it has something to do with it)

Solution 1:

Have a look at PGF/TikZ. A lot of good examples can be found in the PGF/TikZ examples gallery.

Other options include: Asymptote, Sketch 3D, PSTricks, and Gnuplot TikZ terminal.

Solution 2:

Alok is quite right to suggest TikZ: this is probably the best of the current generation of graphics software. Though metapost is well worth looking at.

A historical note: you could embed scaleable graphics in tex documents way back in the olden days, by using metafont to represent graphics as font characters, which could simply be "typed" into .dvi files.

Later, dvips supported encoding of "ps specials" in dvi files, which supported inclusion of .eps figures, and made possible more sophisticated graphics packages such as xy-pic and pstricks.

Metapost allowed the metafont font descriptors to be embedded directly in the dvi file as ps specials.

The advent of pdflatex has changed the landscape a little: not all ps trickery converts as well to the way pdftex handles graphics: metapost is fine, but pstricks requires escaping out to rerender. Hence such packages as pdftricks, which provide a "safe" subset of the functionality of pstricks.

Solution 3:

They are probable plots, generated with GnuPlot and integrated into latex via pstricks.

See:

• http://ftp.fernuni-hagen.de/ftp-dir/pub/mirrors/www.ctan.org/graphics/pstricks/contrib/pst-3dplot/pst-3dplot-doc.pdf
• http://www.gnuplot.info/
• http://tug.org/PSTricks/main.cgi

Solution 4:

I'd recommend GLE: http://www.gle-graphics.org/ Most of the figures in "Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning" by Christopher M. Bishop are made by this tool.

Others also use GnuPlot, all figures in "information theory inference and learning algorithms" by David MacKay.

the above two books are very standard research texts in machine learning field.