Document Classes ⇒ PS Tricks vs. tikz

[avp3000]

Hallo,

As far as I know PS Tricks and tikz are the two most popular and powerful graphics packages for LaTeX. I want to ask which of the two is better (if that is possible to say) or does it depend on what one wants to do. I, personally, need one of those to reproduce (fairly) simply graphics I write down in class. I already know how to use tikz and wonder whether it is a good idea to start learing PS Tricks as well. Thanks a lot.

[balfonsi]

I personally use pstricks for maths figures. I think there are much more extensions for pstricks and it' more powerful, but I don't know really well tikz. The main inconvenience of pstricks is that you can't use it directly to obtain pdf's: you must go the dvi->eps->pdf way (although this seems to be changing with new packages that use the shell escape possibilities)

B.A.

[hubert]

WinEDT's PDFTexify option can be changed to run dvi --> ps --> pdf (dvips + Ghostscript)

Go to Options | Execution Modes | TeX Output | PDF Texify method and you'll find the right radio button.

I teach mathematics at the secondary level, and heavily rely on pst-eucl, pst-math and pstricks-add, as well as nodes to get the job done. Having invested a lot of time+effort into PSTricks and its associated packages, it'll be very difficult for me to re-learn from scratch the niceities of tiKz, or MetaPost or any other package