miktex? gastex? pencil?

I'm curious to know if anyone is actually using the recommended software to draw up their automata type things? fiddled with them it for a few hours and eventually figured my time would be better spent doing the actual assignments. Even the installation was fairly byzantine. Looked around for other options, but a "package for *Tex" seems to be the standard....

Actually looks like something that would be interesting to make, but the issue of output format is a bit of a hassle, although I guess you could drop a raster format picture into an assignment too.

Although I used to use CorelDraw for these kinds of things, have surprisingly found Word's flowchart tools to do a reasonable job. It has some rather annoying quirks though - primarily limited control over the curve on each edge, but at least locks the edges to nodes so that you can move them around without having to go back and adjust each arrow. Wish it would do that for the labels too.

Quick and dirty option seems to be drawing and scanning (if you have a scanner I suppose), but any method just seems to take a vastly disproportianate amount of time to draw as opposed to answer. Guess in the long run it might be worth getting my head around latex, was just wondering what others ended up doing.

I used to use Adobe Illustrator, but since i use Visio for database diagrams and such, and since the university gave it to us on an academic licence, thats what i have been using. I must say i have not bothered with miktex as at first glance it seems to be a postscript compiler, meaning that you have to find a latex editor to get a latex file to give to miktex to get a postscript file, all of which seems like a lot of effort as compared to word or openoffice. Also the download seems pretty hefty on a dial up, particularly when i have the tools to do the job anyway.

HiYa Reuben

I must admit to becoming a bit of a latex (miktex) fan, this after about a 4 hour investment in writing up my first cos407 assignment - could arguably have been faster using word (inserting special symbols one at a time), but I think I now have a pretty good handle on getting a decent looking mathematical text produced.
I used it in conjunction with WinEdt - helps you initially with icon shortcuts for latex typesetting commands, but the manual and examples that come with miktex cover all of these options and more. I'd say it really is useful for a subject like formal logic, where the entire assignment consists of mathematical proofs - the sort of stuff word really isn't great at. I've seen no reason to use it yet in cos460 since the math is limited (thus far). As for the automata diagrams - I haven't had a look at gastex - ms visio data flow diagrams are my work-around

Cheers
William

Have had some luck with Jastex... a java app that gives a kind of IDE and generates the latex code. Still seems rather a hack to then get that into a form thats submitable... PDF???

Got by with Word for 407 thus far too, but would like to learn Latex still. <rant> It's not rocket science, but dunno why open source type things always have these obscure and uneccessary barriers to entry. Maybe I'm dumb, but kept on thinking I had miktex installed wrong cos I couldn't find "it" and was a long while before I found something that explained that it just a mark-up language you might as well make with notepad or something. Of course attacked the manual first, and the link for "first time users click here" just leads to " 'tutorial' is not a valid search query". Just a waste of time playing l33t h4xor when its actually simple stuff... </rant>