Old style technical hand-drawings for a textbook/ebook?

[FischerBoy]

I love the old fascionate drawings in older books on geometry, physics illustrations and math figures. I was wondering: How can this be done for a textbook or ebook? Could I Draw on a White Piece of paper, then use an iphone scanning app and capture the drawing and import to latex or an other program (havent descided what textbook editor to use yet). Anny suggestions on what equipement is needed and how to do it well?

 

[DEvens]

Probably there are better ways than doing it with your phone. Most good photocopiers these days will scan at a reasonably good dots-per-inch value and color or black and white as you please.

Several book formatting programs will let you import picture objects. LaTeX has figure importing capability. Possibly you will want a figure style to go with it.

As a suggestion: Don't draw on paper. Use a good drawing package and draw right on your computer. There are a variety of drawing packages available, even some free ones that will do a reasonable job. It makes updating a lot easier. You can get the same effect as hand drawn. But you can make it readable.

 

[gsal]

This reminds me of the XKCD-style plots in matplotlib...maybe you can develop your own python module that takes some regular matplotlib plot or some other set of CAD commands and generates something that looks like it was done by hand or whatever appearance you have in mind...this way, all drawings would be consistent.