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Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX

225 points by DominikPeters ago | 40 comments
Hi all! TikZ is a widely-used LaTeX package for drawing figures in papers. It uses commands like \draw[->] (0,0) -- (1,2); to draw lines, shapes, text, etc. Academics usually code up their figures by hand, so there is lots of twiddling around with the coordinates and recompiling until things look nice. I guess it’s a bit like SVG, but it’s more code than markup, for example it has loops with \foreach.

I built an open-source WYSIWYG TikZ editor (available for web and desktop) that allows you to edit your TikZ source code visually by dragging and resizing elements. It simultaneously shows the source code and the rendered figure, and lets you edit either one while the two views stay in sync. I’m not aware of any other editors that are simultaneously source editors and WYSIWYG (even for editing SVG or HTML), and I’m quite pleased with how well the combination works.

The way the app is implemented is by parsing the TikZ code, and at all times keeping track of the exact source location of each object. Thereby, when a user drags an element to a new position, the app can override just the numbers in the coordinate without changing anything else in the code (such as line breaks or indentation).

This approach essentially required reimplementing a large fraction of TikZ, which is the kind of task that no human would ever want to do. I think building software that doesn’t exist yet because it would be impossibly tedious to code up is one of the great new possibilities thanks to coding agents, and it’s worth brainstorming for other examples. (This app was built almost entirely by Codex.)

Implementing the app came with lots of fun side quests, including building converters from SVG / pptx / ipe to TikZ, re-implementing the LaTeX hyphenation and line-breaking algorithm to support multi-line nodes, and making a color picker that uses the red!20!black color mixing notation used in LaTeX papers.

otto-riz |next [-]

> the kind of task that no human would ever want to do

I'm not an AI evangelist, but this kind of thing is such a welcome boon. More itches can be scratched!

lopsotronic |next |previous [-]

Ah, I love CircuitiTikZ. Only way to do simple text-based circuit diagrams.

https://ctan.org/pkg/circuitikz?lang=en

https://github.com/circuitikz/circuitikz

Some years ago I wired it up with `asciidoctor-diagram` so we could have simple circuits in our Asciidoc maintenance manuals. The techs loved the hell out of it, and we could collaborate on the things in a git versioned ecosystem vs whatever fresh hell the PDM/ERP had for us.

A very nice complement to the already awesome WireViz (https://github.com/wireviz/WireViz)

j2kun |next |previous [-]

Neat! I also enjoyed https://q.uiver.app/ by https://github.com/varkor which is a bit more specialized.

DominikPeters |root |parent |next [-]

Yes, there are several editors for more specialized things. Other nice examples: https://tikzit.github.io/ and https://www.circuit2tikz.tf.fau.de/designer/ and https://tikzcd.yichuanshen.de/

ixsploit |root |parent |previous [-]

I used lyx during university. Was super happy. Still have all my homework and lecuture notes.

https://www.lyx.org/

mcswell |next |previous [-]

I'm running Linux Mint (xfce version), and I installed the .deb version (TikZ.Editor_0.4.0_amd64.deb). It's very odd...for example, when I open it or do File/New, many (but not all) of the grid cells are rectangles, not squares. Am I doing something wrong, like installing the wrong version? Or maybe misinterpreting what the faint grey lines are?

DominikPeters |root |parent [-]

Yeah that's odd, the grid should be square. Is the web version looking correct in the browser? Feel free to paste some screenshots into https://github.com/DominikPeters/tikz-editor/issues and I can look into it.

master-lincoln |next |previous [-]

As a student I really wanted something like this. Thanks for making it open source. My theoretical computer science prof happened to be Till Tantau the inventor of TikZ. An awesome communicator too.

DominikPeters |root |parent [-]

Schleswig-Holsteiners are everywhere :) Till Tantau also started the beamer package for making LaTeX presentations. Both beamer and tikz are very important contributions to science communication.

sorenjan |next |previous [-]

Looks really nice. You might consider adding some presets to make it easier to get started, like some common neural net architectures and other use cases for TikZ.

DominikPeters |root |parent [-]

Good idea. There is File > Open Example, but it could be extended for sure. On desktop you can even directly open an arXiv paper!

__mharrison__ |next |previous [-]

This is very cool, but I'm going to say the inevitable...

How hard would it be to support cetz? I'm not touching LaTeX if I can avoid it, but I'm using Typst all the time.

meghanto |next |previous [-]

Are you open to people repurposing this app as a plugin to larger apps like obsidian?

DominikPeters |root |parent [-]

Generally yes! It is permissively licensed. I originally considered writing this app as a VS Code extension (because most app ideas that include a source editor are more simply done as an extension) but then decided that I wanted to have more control over the source view.

srean |next |previous [-]

Is their anyone here old enough to remember Xfig ?

I was quite proud of the hours of work I had put in to configure it just so, with the 3d look and all.

bedstefar |root |parent [-]

I do. I used it in the late noughts for my cryptology BSc because I was too lazy/busy to learn TikZ proper

srean |root |parent [-]

Tikz by hand for busy diagrams can be a whole lot of work.

What I loved about Xfig was that one could use latex and latex fonts in the diagrams.

GL26 |next |previous [-]

All STEM students and researches from the world thank you

delta_p_delta_x |next |previous [-]

This is superb. Will you consider adding support for pgfplots[1]? When I was a student I was long considering writing a native application for real-time TikZing.

[1]: https://ctan.org/pkg/pgfplots?lang=en

DominikPeters |root |parent [-]

I think pgfplots should in principle be possible. I've postponed it thus far because pgfplots is GPL licensed, while the editor is MIT licensed, so I would need to distribute pgfplots support as a separate add-on. But in due course, putting in add-on infrastructure could make sense, because it would also allow adding support for stuff like tikzcd and CircuiTikZ (or tikzpingus!).

whatever1 |next |previous [-]

OMG! Psychiatrists are going to lose all of their graduate customers!

The world thanks you.

|root |parent [-]

adityamwagh |next |previous [-]

Hey! I've always wanted something like this! Thanks for building this!

cckolon |next |previous [-]

This is so cool. I would have loved this in college.

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djmips |next |previous [-]

"TikZ ist kein Zeichenprogramm" (German for "TikZ is not a drawing program"). :-)

DominikPeters |root |parent [-]

An explanation for the name from the TikZ docs:

> TikZ’s name is intended to warn people that TikZ is not a program that you can use to draw graphics with your mouse or tablet. Rather, it is more like a “graphics language”.

While making the app I was worried that I was going against the TikZ philosophy. Maybe I should have named it "TikZ ist doch ein Zeichenprogramm" (TideZ)..

dvorka |next |previous [-]

I needed exactly this for years excellent work!

Littice |next |previous [-]

The killer feature for me is not drawing TikZ visually, but being able to touch old TikZ without turning the source into generated-looking soup.

DominikPeters |root |parent [-]

Exactly, I wanted to avoid that. In contrast, if you open an SVG in (for example) Inkscape and make a minimal change and save, the resulting file has little to do with the original.

emil-lp |next |previous [-]

Here's what I would need: the ability to position five nodes in a circular fashion, so that they are evenly spaced.

DominikPeters |root |parent [-]

Intriguing thought. Of course by writing code it can be done

  \foreach \i in {1,...,5} {
    \node[circle, draw] (n\i) at ({90 - 72*(\i-1)}:1cm) {$\i$};
  }
but I'm not sure how to expose that as a UI in a nice way (maybe: if something uses polar coordinates and the user holds shift, then during drag the radius stays fixed, and I nudge towards even angular spacing + multiples of 15 degrees?)

e2e8 |root |parent [-]

That sounds like the array modifier in Blender

dima-quant |next |previous [-]

This is great, nice concept! Good use of coding agents. Now I can make diagrams much faster.

hosteur |next |previous [-]

Wow. I would have loved something like this when I was studying in University.

quantummagic |next |previous [-]

Great job! Thank you for making it open source.

At some point the people who seethe with hate for AI, and claim it's all hallucinations and illegitimate hype, are going to have to admit they were wrong. Projects like this are the proof staring them right in the face, if they care to look.

Barbing |root |parent [-]

They’ve updated their criticisms since - bottom of career ladder disruption, skill atrophy.

(Not on HN but I do still see some folks who last tested LLMs before Nov ‘25, those folks might still be mostly out of touch.)

cubefox |next |previous [-]

That's cool. I guess it doesn't support TikZ' relative positioning (left of etc) because WYSIWYG features like drag-and-drop require absolute positioning?

DominikPeters |root |parent [-]

It does support editing it if relative positioning is used in the code, i.e. if you drag the object it will continue being relatively positioned. But if you add new elements with the various tools, they will be absolutely positioned (not sure what would be a good UI for switching an element to relative positioning) unless you edit the source. You can try with

  \begin{tikzpicture}
    \node[draw] (A) at (0,0) {A};
    \node[draw, right of=A] (B) {B};
  \end{tikzpicture}

delta_p_delta_x |root |parent [-]

> not sure what would be a good UI for switching an element to relative positioning

  1. Right-click on an existing object, offer drop-down context menu.
  2. Menu item `Position relative to...`.
  3. The cursor now selects _other_ objects in the field. 
     a. If there is no other object, then offer to create a new label-less node with (x,y); default to the origin.
     b. Once an object is selected, then offer `right of`, `left of`, `north of`, `south of`, `southeast of`, etc as a drop-down menu, and a field for radial displacement.
        i. As a stretch goal, offer a `Custom position...` button to specify an (x, y) displacement, or a polar angle and radial displacement. These three options (fixed offsets, Cartesian, polar) could also be tabs in the resultant menu from (b) above.
You could use this same UI/UX for `anchor`, too.

david_2107 |next |previous [-]

That's awesome! Long overdue.

k33n |next |previous [-]

Wow, this is really, really great. Congratulations on an excellent offering and piece of tech!

zayd7861 |next |previous [-]

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jimmypk |next |previous [-]

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frankzero |previous [-]

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