Scientists often build figures for publications and talks. To create these figures, they usually rely on powerful tools that are designed for graphic designers to produce artistic figures and are therefore only poorly suited to build scientific figures.

We here present an ImageJ/FIJI plugin called ScientiFig that is devoted to the building of research figures. Our tool can assemble and maintain complex panels containing images with different aspect ratios and associate scalebars, text annotations and ROIs to these panels. Interestingly, our software will always preserve the position of these associated elements even when figure size changes. ScientiFig can export figures as png with a transparent background for a better integration in office documents and as vector graphics that can be finalized using a vector graphics editor. Last but not least, ScientiFig can format figures for various scientific reviews and for example offer to substitute fonts or to resize the figure to better match the journal guidelines (if a journal style does not exist, it can be created using the embedded editor).

For comparison, please find below two alternative tools:

• FigureJ
• OMERO.webfigure