What tools are out there for creating mathematical illustrations in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get mode?
Having struggled with tikz for several years, I've found creating figures in Omnigraffle (https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle) to be a liberating experience. (And they have good tech support.)
The webpage http://wiki.illustrating-mathematics.org/wiki/What_tools_do_we_use%3F mentions Inkscape and Illustrator; how do they compare to Omnigraffle for flexibility and ease of use?
If other people know similar systems that they like better, I'd love to know about them.
Best Answer
I can recommend Ipe from personal experience, although it has been a few years since I've used it.
It is a little clunky, but it will dovetail with your version of LaTeX quite well. You can add preambles to pull in LaTeX packages to your figures, so you can get the fonts in your figures to match the ones in your LaTeX document, for example. You can also save and load Ipe figures in PDF format, so they are easy to include in LaTeX documents.