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I am curious what sort of applications people use to make very nice diagrams that often appear in papers and books. I attached an example of the sort of diagram that I am interested in making, particularly the curved coordinate systems (I am typing up some notes on Differential Geometry). Metapost seems useful, but the only real way I can see to create the curved coordinate system is to manually draw in each line via coordinates... which seems unpleasant to say the least.

Thanks for your help!

Differential Geometry Diagram

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    I have no idea, but this interests me too!2011-08-16
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    Well, there's [Asymptote](http://asymptote.sourceforge.net/) and [TikZ](http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/graphics/pgf/)... and then most good computing environments nowadays (Maple, *Mathematica*, MATLAB) are now able to generate graphics suitable for framing and hanging.2011-08-16
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    ...and if you need to go 3D, there's [POV-Ray](http://www.povray.org/). I've seen people here do wonderful things with [GeoGebra](http://www.geogebra.org/) as well.2011-08-16
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    Maybe email some authors asking what software was used?2011-08-16
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    Getting the curved coordinate system directly with Asymptote or Mathematica may be harder than just porting over an image of a flat coordinate system into Photoshop and bending it there.2011-08-16
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    This is a nice diagram. I think it could be reproduced with [ipe](http://ipe7.sourceforge.net/). This is a nice easy to use program that has a number of advantages over something like xfig. One of the best features is the nice integration with LaTeX. It accepts LaTeX code. Another notable feature is that the cursor can "snap" to intersection points or vertices, or curves or chosen angles etc. The curved grid could be constructed by duplicating a couple of perpendicular spline curves and snapping the control point to an underlying grid. There may be a better way though. Cropping is easy too.2011-08-16

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