title: How to produce high quality 3d figures (parametric) with latex text
body: <p>I need to make a bunch of 3D figures for a geometry document. Roughly speacking, parametric surfaces, some vectors, planes, and, very important : I need to include some LaTeX text (axes names, point names...). Here is <a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/XSkqI.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer">typical example of what I want</a>.</p>
  
  <p>The attached figure was produced using GeoGebra, and then I used Ksnapshot to make a screenshot. This gives a .png, which is almost o.k. The fact is that I need these figures .pdf or .ps. GeoGebra does not export the 3D view in any of these formats.</p>
  
  <p>I tried some alternatives, but none is completely satisfying. Basically my problem is that none of my usual tools works (GeoGebra, SAGE, R), so I need to learn something new, and quite fast in fact. I am a math guy, not a programmer.</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Sage or SageMathCloud : one cannot annotate easily using LaTeX.</li>
  <li>TexGraph : pretty hard to get some results. Documentation quite cryptic, problems handling singularities (the cone vertex for instance) and not easy to obtain the good combination of opacities.</li>
  <li>I did not try it myself, but someone told me that to put the latex annotations in Mathematica is not possible. I do not use Mathematica, in fact.</li>
  <li>I took a look at TiKZ. The code seems pretty cumbersome and cryptic too.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Any suggestions? Python and matplotlib? I don't know about Python, so if this is a suggestion, I would appreciate a good "Python for newbies" reference too. </p>
  
  <p>Can Inkscape do this job? Any suggestion is welcome!</p>
  
  <p>Thanks a lot!</p>
  
  <p>JC</p>