Charlie Gibbons writes,
I will be a TA for intermediate micro this fall and am looking for a program to use to draw graphs for my handouts (eg, utility curves, budget sets, etc). I would like to be able to:
Draw the curves “freehand” (smooth curves based upon path points, but not by plotting, say, y = ln(x) ) Save in vector format (especially encapsulated PostScript so that it is compatible with LaTeX).
This sounds good to me. Does anyone know of any software out there that does this? My quick thought is that it’s not actually so hard to write R code to make graphs that look right–I just play with the functional form a bit (using curve(), that convenient hack in R) until it looks how I want. But, yeah, it would be useful to make sketches and put them in documents. I’m sure something’s available that does so.
And now, the unsolicited advice
But . . . maybe my real question to Charlie should be: Should you really be making handouts at all? Teaching assistants always want to lecture and prepare handouts. Really, though, textbook writers are professionals, and they’ve put everything you need right in the book.
My advice is: take the time you were going to put into these handouts, and instead spend it supervising the students in active learning: mostly working in pairs or small groups on homework or homework-like problems. Or, if you really want to prepare some extra material, prepare some drills so you can do your best to make sure that all your students get the basics down.
I would suggest xfig (www.xfig.org)
I use Mayura draw for just this purpose. It's elegant and cheap.
http://www.mayura.com/
xfig would be a lot better, but for quick stuff locator() in R lets you create a series of points which you can fit a regression or lowess curve to.
plot.new()
plot(lowess(locator(n=20)), type='l')
A free tool to make anything is Pstrick: you just program directly your graph in Latex. You do not need to download anything, it is just a Latex package.
Your legend and labels can use any letters (including greek ones) in any font. There is nothing more beautiful for a Latex beamer presentation than a Latex graph itself (at least this is my opinion). Look here for examples with some code:
http://tug.org/PSTricks/main.cgi?file=examples.
Otherwise, for statistical graphs I prefer the flexibility of Stata to R. With the new Stata 10 you can even change the graphs interactively.
Cheers
Graph Sketcher?
http://www.graphsketcher.com/
I would suggest Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org). It's free and open source, and as far as I can remember it can save in EPS or PDF, should be a format that LaTeX can use.
But, Andrews, I haven't quite TA'd yet myself, but I would think that at times it's important to adapt material to a teaching style. After all, I have yet to meet a professor who feels every chapter of a text is necessary. There's a lot of skipping.
Jesse,
Skipping chapters is ok. Heck, I even skip chapters when teaching out of my own books. But I strongly recommend against preparing handouts. If there's something you really really want in a handout that's not in the text, try devoting an hour of section to it. Describe to the students the handouts you'd like them to have, then get the students working in pairs to do it themselves. You can circulate around the room making sure they're on track.
This is an old post, but I had to mention Omnigraffle from the Omnigroup. This is Mac OSX only. But it is the greatest thing for making quick/slick sketches.