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Jonas Frey (Nov 19 2023 at 01:19):Is there an online tool to create simple one-dimensional string diagrams? What's the easiest one?
Jean-Baptiste Vienney (Nov 19 2023 at 05:08):Not online, but there is tikzit. There is also another one that @Ralph Sarkis like more I think, I don't remember what it is.
Jonas Frey (Nov 19 2023 at 05:11):Thanks! I was just playing around with tikzit, and it seems pretty good! But I would also be interested to hear about the other option.
Ralph Sarkis (Nov 19 2023 at 07:40):I haven't used tangle enough to be convinced I prefer it over TikZiT.
I like the artistic freedom TikZiT gives me for the colors, shapes, thickness, etc. of the drawing, but I don't like the artistic freedom in the placement of boxes and wires, tangle is more mechanical on that front.
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Nov 19 2023 at 11:18):If you want to use string diagrams mainly for "illustration" purposes and you don't need too much artistic tinkering, you may want to check out rewalt.
Basically you create diagrams by adding generators to your "signature" and composing them together as you would do for morphisms, then you can generate tikz code for their string diagram representation.
I've heard homotopy.io also has tikz output now but I haven't tried it.
Jules Hedges (Nov 19 2023 at 20:34):Ralph Sarkis said:
I haven't used tangle enough to be convinced I prefer it over TikZiT.
tangle is the most convenient thing I know, it just runs in browser and it makes very nice looking output if you happen to hit its feature set, but afaik it's not "officially released"
Spencer Breiner (Nov 20 2023 at 01:10):If you're feeling brave, you could try the (very alpha) semagrams demo here:
https://semagrams.algebraicjulia.org/apps/dwd/
Click in the window and hit "h" to bring up a help pop-up with affordances.
To clear the loaded instance, you can hit "s" to call up the import/export window, then "Ctrl+A" to select all and "Backspace" to erase the existing diagram.
Jonas Frey (Nov 20 2023 at 01:33):Thanks for all your answers! I think for now I'll stick with tikzit.