Re: make a drawing with Emacs

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2020-09-01, at 11:04, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:

> You want programmability.
>
> Look into TiKZ (whether you end up using it or not) for some
> inspiration on what you might want a drawing program to do for
> you.
>
> Or Metapost: as an heir to Metafont, it probably has that declarative
> touch to it.

To expand a bit (as a TikZ user and a former METAPOST user):

METAPOST is older, has (I think) less add-ons than TikZ, but has a few
very distinctive features, most notably drawing "nice" Bezier curves
without specifying the control points, and a declarative engine for
solving systems of linear equations - a very nice thing to have when you
want to find intersections of lines.  (TikZ has the former if you use
LuaTeX and some package I don't remember the name of, and the latter
sort-of, i.e., much less general.)

METAPOST is rather sparsely documented (that said, I used it for
considerable time and was satisfied with it).

If you stick with METAPOST, consider looking at ConTeXt, which heavily
extends it with the so-called "METAFUN macros".

Most probably, you want TikZ.  Excellent software, excellent
documentation, numerous add-ons.  Nice things are:

- it has a _lot_ of ways to specify coordinates (2D, pseudo-3D, polar
coordinates and a lot more),

- there are a lot of ways to add various labels (called "nodes") to the
drawing.

Hth,

--
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl