More with Diagrams?

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

Dear Lout developers,

I have begun writing my thesis in LaTeX,
but am still looking for a good tool to make the diagrams I need.
I've been recommended lout as a possible way to make them.

The kind of diagrams that I'm interested can be seen in
        http://fare.tunes.org/tmp/implement1/
It's mostly your usual commutative diagrams, except that I need a variety of
neatly different arrows to express visually several facts:
* some functions are deterministic, some are non-deterministic
 (I like "waved" vs "straight" arrows for that).
* some functions partial, some are total
 (I like having a circle in the middle of the arrow for that)
* some functions are injective, some are not
 (I like having a U-shaped tip at the source for that)
* some functions are surjective, some are not
 (I like having a double-arrow at the destination tip for that)
* some arrows express association, some express type declaration
 (I like the usual | on the source tip, for that)
* some arrows are functorial, some are not
 (I like distinguishing two kind of arrow tips for that)
* some arrows are given, some are deduced
 (I like using both color and width of text and drawing elements for that)
* to avoid overlap, particularly when arrows share same source
 and destination, some arrows need be curved.

Additional difficulties:
* I like being able to keep the same inter-element spacing
 among several figures, even though sizes differ.
* the produced eps or pdf are very big - it looks like they include font
 information or some such; this might make the file very big when there
 are lots of figures. Could there be a way to share font data
 betweeen different .eps figures?

Can you recommend lout as a tool to do all that?
Is it adaptable to such needs?

Yours freely,

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[  TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System  | http://tunes.org  ]
...so that IBM Java envangelist tells me "nothing spread as fast as Java",
to which I answer: "crack!"...