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samcarter / tikzlings

Collection of animals and other beings drawn in TikZ
https://ctan.org/pkg/tikzlings
LaTeX Project Public License v1.3c
90 stars 7 forks source link

New animal suggestion (capybara) #5

Open hjnowakowski opened 5 years ago

hjnowakowski commented 5 years ago

Hi, my good friend asked me if I can make a new animal (capybara). I said yes but I have no idea how you made them.

Can I ask you:

:)

samcarter commented 5 years ago

@hjnowakowski Thanks for your interest in adding a capybara! I know by chance that there are at least two tikzlings fans from South America - I'm sure they will be very happy about the addition of it!

My usual design workflow for the tikzlings is the following

  1. perform an image search for the animal (or being) to gather the most important features of it. It can also help to repeat the image search for cliparts featuring this animal (or being)

  2. then I start with one of the existing tikzlings which is the most similar to the one to be added. For a capybara the \marmot might be a good starting point. It has these small slightly elliptical ears and with the option teeth it can show its chisel teeth

  3. Based from there I either directly adjust the code or open the .pdf in inkscape if I want to add shapes which are more complicate then simple circles or ellipses. There is an extension available for inkscape (https://github.com/kjellmf/svg2tikz) which allows me to export the shapes I added in inkscape back to tikz.

  4. (this is probably the most important step) Once a first draft is finished, I usually show it somewhere to get feedback. tex.stackexchange.com and in particular the chatroom chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/41 are good places with lots of users that have good ideas.