[Ipe-discuss] TikZ exporter ipelet

[Otfried Cheong]

On Thu, Oct 6, 2016, at 01:56, Joe Rabinoff wrote:
> > Note also that starting from very recent Ipe versions, Ipe fully
> > supports using Tikz inside Ipe text objects.   In particular, there is
> > now a tikz.isy style sheet that is part of the distribution.   I would
> > probably be good to rename one of the two to avoid confusion (I would be
> > happy to rename mine, as it is only meant as inspiration as to what can
> > be done).
> 
> Ah, very cool.  I could rename mine to ipe2tikz.isy, or you could just
> use
> the relevant bits from my version too if you like.  It might save you
> some
> time -- it wasn't easy to make Ipe definitions for standard TikZ arrow
> tips, since those depend on so many parameters -- what I ended up doing
> was
> making a simple picture in TikZ, compiling to PDF, and directly
> extracting
> the PDF drawing commands :)

I will rename my "tikz.isy" to "tikz-shapes.isy", since that is all it
currently does:  Define styles for labels so that they will be drawn
inside a nice Tikz node.

Your "tikz.isy" style sheet should also be very useful to people who
like to use Tikz inside Ipe - it will guarantee that the parts drawn
using Tikz and the parts drawn directly in Ipe will be more uniform.

One idea would be to have an option to export not into a separate
document, but to create a text object containing the tikzpicture.  One
could also select some objects, call the ipelet, and it would replace
the objects by a single text object that creates the same drawing in 
Tikz.

I personally do all my Tikz work in Ipe now - especially using the
"Apply" button on the "Edit text" dialog, you can immediately see the
output when you make changes to the Tikz code.

Cheers,
  Otfried