Graphics, Figures & Tables ⇒ Suitability of LaTeX for graphics heavy reports

[QuinRiva]

I work for a consulting company and we often produce reports for our clients. Currently most of our reports are either written in Powerpoint or Excel (yes reports written in Excel...). Myself and a number of my colleagues used LaTeX extensively in uni (we're all eng/science background).

Current Approach
Reports generally take the structure of Exec Summary, high level overview of the business, then a detailed analysis of each by category (business unit, state, type of vehicle, etc.), where each category may be one or two pages in the report. Insights (i.e. words) of the results are therefore restricted in length to the available space on the page.

Excel & Powerpoint
Excel has the advantage of being able to produce charts text and labels in a single document, but is an utter clusterfuck when it comes to printing, and if the charts are produced in another program (R or Tableau) the main advantage is lost. Powerpoint enables more precise, and less clunky positioning of text and graphics, but referencing, contents page, etc. has to be done manually - and any changes to the charts (which comprise the majority of the report) require the charts to be pasted in.

Alternatives?
From memory LaTeX offers a lot of advantages in the referencing, and obviously automatically inserts the latest charts; however I recall it being a pain to precisely position charts and images, and I'm not sure how easy floating text (labels) is over charts.

Has this improved much over the last 5 years (the last time I used LaTeX)? Is there another markup language I should consider? Another alternative could be InDesign?

[Johannes_B]

Welcome,

I think LaTeX can do what you want. You can export your data and plot it with LaTeX, the advantage of having the same font is obvious; and you can add and position labels the way you want.

If you want to precisely fix the position of figures/charts and you find the floating behaviour of LaTeX annoying, simply don't use a floating environment.

Have a look at pgfplots.net to see what diagrams in LaTeX can look like.

Disclaimer: Getting good diagrams in LaTex needs quite a bit of knowledge and experience, but there are good tutorials in the package manuals.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi,

and welcome to the forum!

I use LaTeX for charts and diagrams. You get the best quality with native LaTeX tools, and today they are extremely capable and mature, such as pgfplots.

Besides pgfplots.net, you can take a look at LaTeX-Cookbook.net where I posted some sample diagrams and charts with full code and PNG and PDF output.

As you already know LaTeX, great! Should not be too hard to get used to this fine tool.

In case of questions, let us know! We can talk here about creating and fine-tuning charts and diagrams.

Stefan