On the lure of the user manual for a geek
When I first used beamer (the LaTeX package for making presentations), I noticed that there was an included packagage called PGF for drawing figures. Unlike the drawing packages most people are familiar with, in which you click on tools and use the mouse to drag shapes out on a virtual page, PGF requires you to enter commands to specify points to be drawn in an x,y co-ordinate system. So, for example, if you wanted to draw a diagonal line going up and to the right, you’d specify a line from (0,0) to (1,1). I took a look at it and thought it looked interesting, but far too taxing on the brain when you could use something like OmniGraffle and actually see what you’re drawing as you’re drawing it.
And then I downloaded the latest version of beamer several weeks ago, and noticed that there’s now a more user-friendly syntax layer on top of PGF, called TikZ. TikZ tones down the hardcore nerdiness required to draw pictures (a bit), and after seeing some of the rather gorgeous output that it can produce, I could feel myself getting curious about it. Then I glanced at the superb user manual (3.5 MB PDF file) and was really hooked.
