I run the risk that this post is being reported for advertising

Thursday afternoon I finished a series of meaurements for which the report should be finished and on the desk of my client by Friday 17:00. And I had to fly home Thursday afternoon as well.

What I had was a number of CSV files with inside those files buried the measurement data.

The report I had to produce would contain 20 of those graphs, a bunch of JPG images and about 5 tables. The report had to be "scientific", so table of contents, header, footer, correct figure, lemma and table numbering, section numbering, cross references, bibliography, the works.

I did have 80% of all this formats in previous reports, so I did not have to re-invent the wheel, and it was not my first Latex report either.

Nevertheless, producing these graphs from the CSV files was new, but went fast thanks to some Gnuplot scripts. Including titles, scales and annotation. As a matter of fact I only had to write two versions of the graphs and the rest was copy & paste.

All the knowledge of the report was in my head, but it had to be ordered, divided in chapters and set up logically.

Eventually the report contained 29 pages. Including proofreading it was finished on Friday at 16:45.

Until Friday 16:00 I spent all my time composing the report, wording, correct set-up clear wording of conclusions etc. In vim. At 16:00 I started proofreading, which is surprisingly easy because the layout is so different that the author hardly suffers from text blindness which usually occurs when reading your own documents. In my experience, proofeading the PDF once is sufficient to get out 95% of all errors.

The next 45 minutes I spent correcting logical, style and grammatical errors. Time spent for layout, correction of numbering, captions and references: 30 seconds.

This is incredible.

Everyone who has ever written a serious report in Word or Writer knows that the author has to spend hours and hours in correcting styles, layout, captions, references, paragraph numbering, table of contents, and then correcting over and over again. Graphs tend to jump to locations where the don't belong, to the footer, or to page 1, but not where they should be. Captions disappear or appear twice, whatever. The more the deadline approaches, the worse it gets. The auther gets completely text blind as he has read thru the text a zillion times already. The worst thing is, time to produce does not decrease with increasing experience of the author as the same actions error corrections have to be repeated over and over again.

I can't remember I have ever written a report this fast.

jlinkels

Good to hear of other people finding theese tools useful. I love LaTeX and GnuPlot, I have a collection of templates wich I use all the time. As were sharing stories I managed to put together a 50+ page report in an evening once. I use the term put together purposfully, the report was mainly graphics with a breif explanations of each and about 10 pages of discussion mostly already written (I would run a simulation and write most of the words for the previous one while it was running - the simulations where done over a couple of days). I love LaTeX!

I have also used gnuplot and genrally like it but I have not yet found a style I really like. Any advice? What settings are you using for your GnuPlot scripts?

Generally I am using most of the defult styles for graphs, text and annotations. In the attached graph I did not alter text or line styles.

It is important however to generate the graphs in the correct resolution. When a picture is rendered in -say- 1024x768 and the picture is inserted in a Latex document using size 0.7\textwidth, the lines appear way too thin. The attached picture was rendered 600x450 and appears just right in the PDF, although still slightly thin lines. Using a still lower rendering sacrifices detail in the picture, and makes text too large. Once you start altering that it becomes a project at itself. With this resolution the outer frame line thickness of the graph is about equal with a table \hline, and the scales text about the same size as 11pt text in the document.

I know about the option to export a graph to set term latex, but the one time I tried that, the result was horrible. It is undoubtedly possible to tweak that to the correct result, but that will be for the next project. As always.

I have also experimented with TikZ for inserting pictures. It should be possible to insert graphs from data files as well. TikZ has a learning curve as steep as Latex and Vim combined, but the results are extremely appealing to the eye.

For ordinary one-of-a-kind pictures I would recommend TikZ only for extremely important documents like your final thesis, a book to be printed or when 200 similar pictures of similar data have to be generated. Then it is worth to invest the time to develop the picture. The TikZ author claims average 4 hours per picture, just like 4 hours per half page is a normal figure.

Once I did a commercial (that is, paid for) report with TikZ containing about 50 pictures, 11 groups of 5 each. Developing the first version was hell, the next 8 to 9 groups went faster as compared to drawing everything in Inkscape or QCAD, and exporting, inserting, compiling, viewing, changing, re-exporting etc. If you have 12 drawings of a kind and you want to change each line of a certain type into 0.7mm, red, then TikZ is a blessing. Nevertheless, I lost a huge number of hours in this project, although the result was perfect.

jlinkels

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1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for your advice - I wonder how often someone posts a thread, answers it?

Ref the plots in Latex.

Last week I discovered the pgfplots package in Latex. It does away with all the problems of styles mismatch when plotting in Gnuplot or Inkscape and adding it to Latex. Another advantage is that when you link to an external data file, the graph is updated whenever the data file is changed.

As far as I could see in a short time (I was working on a report) pgfplots provides every graph, scale and style available in gnuplot and then some.

Pgfplots is a packakge on top of Tikz, which is an insanely extensive package by itself. Pfgplots avoids re-inventing the wheel if you intended to plot using Tikz.

The learning curve is none. The 500-page manual provides so many examples that you can use copy & paste and adjust the one or two details you want to set different.

jlinkels