I was thinking of using Inkscape to prepare and arrange figures for use in my PhD thesis and possibly also publication in a scientific journal. Some of the components of these figures will be basic graphs, perhaps constructed in Excel or perhaps using dedicated software such as Sigma Plot. The majority of images will be bitmaps (probably TIFFs) and Inkscape may be used to apply scale bars, arrows and labels etc. Is Inkscape an appropriate choice for this or are there better options? Maybe Adobe Indesign would be nice but a little over the top Thanks.

Hi.

Hi.
In my opinion Inkscape is a very good choice for this.
For all the figures (plots) I would stay away from bitmaps as much as possible and instead use graphs imported as SVG.
To create SVG's there are many good alternatives like python with matplotlib http://matplotlib.org/gallery.html
An open source package that I like very much is Veusz, http://home.gna.org/veusz/examples/
For more "advanced" plots and volumetric renderings have a look at mayavi, http://docs.enthought.com/mayavi/mayavi/auto/examples.html

SigmaPlot and Adobe Indesign looks good but are out of my "leauge" - costwise.

The beauty of staying with vector based plots is that you avoid a plethora of problems associated with scaling of bitmaps.
For a quick explanation on why you should avoid bitmaps; http://www.sigmaplot.com/products/sigmaplot/productuses/prod-uses25.php

Good Luck.
RGDS Ragnar

If you want dynamic (or not) presentation of your data see http://d3js.org.
it has a lots of visualization. Most (80% ?) use svg so they could be imported in inkscape
(In theory because a lot of them use external css that are not supported in inkscape : all objects will be black)

If you use chrome/chromium : right click the chart / inspect element => if the element starts with <svg then use copy as html (else browse the DOM to find the svg)/ paste in a text editor and save the text as foo.svg

The basics exemples (bar/stacked charts donuts...) are rather straightforward (load csv, set some axis properties and you're done) and well documented.
Some complex visualization are generic enough to fit nicely with "any" data but most will require some hard work to accomodate your data.

Hey. Thanks for your input. I do not need to be converted to the way of the SVG. I have already seen the light and repented my sins! I failed to indicate, however, that the reason for which the majority of my images will be bitmaps is because they're micrographs (photographs taken through a microscope) of living cells. Everything else I will try to keep in vector formats but these micrographs cannot be. I would therefore be embedding many large photographs (each 5.5 MB when uncompressed TIFFs) into Inkscape.

I'm not yet sure what D3JS is. It looks awesome but will probably have little practical implication for inclusion in my thesis which is to be printable; similarly anything submitted for inclusion in the main body of a scientific journal must be printable also. It may later be very useful for future presentations so I'll bookmark that site but not so much for assembling my figures.

seans_potato_biz wrote:I'm not yet sure what D3JS is. It looks awesome but will probably have little practical implication for inclusion in my thesis which is to be printable; similarly anything submitted for inclusion in the main body of a scientific journal must be printable also. It may later be very useful for future presentations so I'll bookmark that site but not so much for assembling my figures.

Yeah I was rather off topic with d3.js.

But I'm not sure Inkscape is not OT itself for what you want to do.
Sure your result will be vector which is great.
But if your results are not 100% final you'll have to step through regeneration (via external tools) to get new version of your graphs then integrate into inkscape (even if it could be simple if you could generate graph as svg then link them in inkscape).
Plus I think inkscape is not the best tool to label and draw arrows consistently coz it lacks a style browser/selector

I don't know what I'll use if I need to do it. Maybe Word/Excel/PowerPoint/Open office => pdf => inscape

Just a word about embedding image to warn you that someone opened a thread those day complaining about loosing data because of embedded object getting corrupted.
I didn't see it myself but I don't embed large images as -it seems- he does.
Maybe go for external images until your svg is final.