I have used Postscript directly to generate geometric figures. The Postscript book is available free on the web (www.adobe.com/products/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf). Postscript can then be embedded into TeX papers, by the program "dvips". Many of the figures in the web version of Hakmem (http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/hakmem/hakmem.html) were implemented directly in Postscript, prior to being converted into .gif's. E.g., http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/hakmem/Figure3a.html See also http://web.mit.edu/afs/sipb/contrib/postscript/Cookbook/ At 04:12 PM 3/7/2006, Russ Cox wrote:
Is there a good program for drawing geometric figures, such as ellipses and hyperbolas; in particular, I'd like to type in the equations, and have it generate a picture that I can save as a bmp file. Once I have a bmp file, I can use Acrobat to generate a pdf, then use that in LaTex.
You should look at MetaPost. It generates Postscript and you can use that directly in LaTeX.
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/hobby/MetaPost.html
Russ