I need to make a bunch of 3D figures for a geometry document. Roughly speacking, parametric surfaces, some vectors, planes, and, very important : I need to include some LaTeX text (axes names, point names...). Here is typical example of what I want.
The attached figure was produced using GeoGebra, and then I used Ksnapshot to make a screenshot. This gives a .png, which is almost o.k. The fact is that I need these figures .pdf or .ps. GeoGebra does not export the 3D view in any of these formats.
I tried some alternatives, but none is completely satisfying. Basically my problem is that none of my usual tools works (GeoGebra, SAGE, R), so I need to learn something new, and quite fast in fact. I am a math guy, not a programmer.
- Sage or SageMathCloud : one cannot annotate easily using LaTeX.
- TexGraph : pretty hard to get some results. Documentation quite cryptic, problems handling singularities (the cone vertex for instance) and not easy to obtain the good combination of opacities.
- I did not try it myself, but someone told me that to put the latex annotations in Mathematica is not possible. I do not use Mathematica, in fact.
- I took a look at TiKZ. The code seems pretty cumbersome and cryptic too.
Any suggestions? Python and matplotlib? I don't know about Python, so if this is a suggestion, I would appreciate a good "Python for newbies" reference too.
Can Inkscape do this job? Any suggestion is welcome!
Thanks a lot!
JC