making figures
Deep recently discussed making figures with Intaglio. Here is a summary of his thoughts on it in terms of pros and cons. It is fast and light weight (i.e., not a resource hog). It’s relatively cheap. We looked into pricing and believe that it costs $89 compared to $199 for the student version of Adobe Illustrator or $599 for the commercial version. It could be said that your lab or institution may have a license for Illustrator, which would mean that at least for the time while you’re there price is a nonissue. Having said that, the point is often raised, ‘well what about when I leave?’. But even there, if one assumes that the next institution will not have Illustrator, why not switch to something cheaper at that point. In any case, an additional pro (in Deep’s view) is that it’s very easy to learn and has a simple and intuitive interface.
In cons, Deep and two other LCVers have experienced a strange error with MATLAB line plots. MATLAB exports lines as a set of anchor points (connected by a path) between the two endpoints. For some reason, in Intaglio, some of the extraneous anchor points will move out of the space spanned by the line, which creates jagged looking lines. You can fix this by projecting the stray anchor points back to the line, but these changes often revert back without explanation. An additional con is that there is no ‘transform each’ feature, allowing to you modify individual elements. If you resize dots in a scatter, the x y position of the dots will change as you scale their size. Deep noted that he has not found a work-around but believes there may be one. In Deep’s experience, Intaglio does not deal with LaTeXiT equations better than Illustrator.
Other cons have less to do with Intaglio, but with using it as part of our lab. There is a limited knowledge base with it in our lab. Only Eero and Josh are using it. If you run into problems before a deadline, they are your only help. In our department, there are many more people using Illustrator, so the surrounding knowledge base for it is likewise much bigger. In a similar vein, many of Deep’s collaborators use Illustrator. He’s encountered serious issues opening/editing a PDF made in Illustrator with Intaglio and vice versa. It should be noted that similar issues exist when collaborating with others who have newer or older versions of Illustrator. It’s best if everyone uses the same vector graphics editor.
Considering these factors, Deep concluded the cons of Intaglio far outweighed the pros. After making one poster in Intaglio, he switched to Illustrator for all subsequent data figures. For schematic figures, though, he sometimes still uses Intaglio for its ease of use. He then copies the finished schematic back into Illustrator if that’s possible.
