schematics

Schematics

A methodology diagram carries the paper's central idea in one glance, and it is the figure most often faked: outdated palettes, boxes that say nothing, arrows that go the wrong way, components the text never mentions. Image models draw clean diagrams with legible text when they are told the publication standards on every call and their output is judged against a rubric, not admired. This skill is that loop: describe the diagram precisely, render it under the standards, score it, and re-render once from the critique.

The medium

• generate_image with purpose: "schematic" is the medium for every diagram. The tool prepends the publication framing (white background, one sans-serif face, Okabe-Ito palette with one accent, one reading direction, verbatim labels, no invented parts, no figure numbers or captions inside the image) to your description, so you write the content, not the house style. It renders with Nano Banana Pro through Ace or the user's own Gemini key, or GPT Image 2 through the user's own OpenAI key; the environment line names the route.
• Use image_size: "1K" while iterating and "2K" for the accepted render of anything printed; set aspect_ratio from the page slot (16:9 or 21:9 for a full-width overview, 4:3 or 1:1 for a column). Score the 1K render; the 2K file is written for the manuscript and is not read back. It weighs several megabytes, and a request carrying a few of them is too large for the Ace gateway (images over 2 MB are not sent on that route at all). Pass reference_paths when the paper's earlier figures or a cited paper's diagram set the style (up to 14 on a Gemini or OpenAI key; Ace takes one image per request). Output is raster at print resolution; \includegraphics takes the PNG.
• Do not hand-draw a schematic as TikZ, SVG, Graphviz, Mermaid or matplotlib shapes, and do not offer that as a fallback: language models draw these badly and the result reads as an unfinished figure. Exact labels are handled by giving the model the exact labels and checking them, not by switching medium.
• Plots of numbers are never image-generated (hallucinated values, repeated elements). Load the figures skill for data.
• If the environment says image generation is unavailable, stop before drawing: tell the user once that schematics need Ace, or a Gemini or OpenAI key connected in Customize → Models, leave an \fbox{} placeholder with the planned caption in the manuscript if one is being written, and continue with the rest of the request.