User friendly software for math drawings

Question

I am a math grad student and these days I am writing my thesis using $\LaTeX$. I have to use few 2D graphs that contain curves and shaded regions with few labeling. Can anybody please recommend me a user friendly free software that I can use to draw my figures?

Answer 1

I’d look into Tikz, which is a package for LaTeX. It’s fairly intuitive if you’ve used LaTeX before and I think (based on your description) it’s good for what you’re going for.

Here’s a link to an Overleaf page describing some of its basic functionality:

There’s obviously more you can do with it (I recently used it/an extension of it to draw circuits for a Laplace transform paper I wrote), so you can do some more googling to find what you think you need out of it. Good luck!

Answer 2

Tikz is a great choice, but not very user-friendly (i suppose same goes for asymptote).

I would recommend Geogebra if you want something more user friendly or WYSIWYG type. Besides, one could draw in geogebra and then export it to tikz/pstricks.

One big advantage of tikz over graphic softwares is styles. But, one can draw in geogebra, export it to tikz, and then incorporate tikz styles (by editing tikz code). There are other things in tikz one cannot hope to achieve in a drawing software (eg: markings on line/curve in tikz).