Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: [Phys-l] Software for drawing free-body diagrams?



Thank you for the outline, John.

Does anyone knows if they have a version that will work on Mac (OS X)?

Ludwik
===============================================



On Sep 14, 2011, at 6:58 PM, John Denker wrote:

On 09/14/2011 11:30 AM, Bill Baggett wrote:
What software exists to help students draw free-body diagrams?

I'm particularly interested in software that is:
1) specialized for drawing free-body diagrams, and
2) free (of course open source is ideal) or inexpensive.
However, if you feel that a particular general-purpose graphics
program is better than most for this task, then that would also be
good to know.

I'm a big fan of general-purpose tools. For the N tasks I
do, I find that the time it takes to learn one general-purpose
tool is waaay less than the time it would take to learn N
specialized tools. Your mileage may vary as a function of
N, but for me it's not even close.

I recommend inkscape. I've drawn hundreds of drawings with
it. The price is right ($0) and it is quite powerful. Its
approach to the problem is close enough to Adobe Illustrator
($$$$) that if you know one you can very quickly pick up the
other. Lots of positive transference from one to the other.
Inkscape can read and write all sorts of file formats, but
its "favorite" is svg, which I also recommend. It is an
open format, open not just in the legal sense but also in
the practical sense, by which I mean you can look at the
svg, figure out what it is doing, and change it if you want.

Adobe Illustrator is the 900-pound gorilla in this space.
The main thing that keeps inkscape from being in the same
league is its lack of support for colorspaces other than
RGB. Nowadays almost everybody except hardcore graphics
professionals thinks in RGB anyway, and you probably
wouldn't have noticed this limitation if I hadn't
mentioned it. You can postprocess the RGB to CMYK or
whatever anyway (within limits).

Inkscape is standard equipment on all the major Linux
distributions.

=============

All this assumes you are happy with 2D drawings (including
2D perspective drawings of 3D scenes) and don't need to
draw rotatable 3D structures. There are tools for 3D, but
that is a whole nother discussion.
_______________________________________________
Forum for Physics Educators
Phys-l@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu
https://carnot.physics.buffalo.edu/mailman/listinfo/phys-l

=======================================================================
Ludwik Kowalski, whose profile is at:

http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/my_profile.html