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When I started writing papers I was really bullish on tikz. I thought that professional looking papers should have figures that were precise to the mm. But the time it takes to get something useful is just insane. I quickly moved to the vectorial drawing tool I had handy: keynote. It’s really not made for that, but it has enough features that you can quickly use it to do pretty things. I ended up using keynote to do all the figures in Real-World Cryptography https://www.amazon.com/dp/1617296716/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_GA...

You can see some example in this thread: https://twitter.com/cryptodavidw/status/1436368473395925000?...

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I personally use Adobe XD for almost everything vector. It's not the job it's made for, but it's way faster to work in and is easier to organize. No need to switch between lucidcharts, illustrator and XD when everything I need is in one place.

Nice work! On using tikz for vector graphics, I use it mostly for technical presentations. I'm terribly slow and abysmal at writing tikz code, but still I was hell-bent on using it—just because of the clean and smooth melding of text and diagrams. I should really look at other tools to save time. I can't justify spending so much time mucking around with tikz anymore.

Went through the Twitter thread and these look really great.

Clear, understandable, just enough detail and context.

Congratulations on creating this book and putting it out into the world.

> I quickly moved to the vectorial drawing tool I had handy: keynote. It’s really not made for that [...]

You would be surprised at how many figures are drawn with PowerPoint on papers at top Machine Learning conferences.

I would say a large proportion of top chemical/materials science papers are also drawn in only powerpoint (besides data, where origin>matlab>excel).

Oh and I forgot, I have some of my tikz here: https://www.iacr.org/authors/tikz/

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