Illustration is harder than writing and mostly untaught outside if very specialized circles. Still, it is something I wanted to learn to improve my papers (Bret Victor being a huge inspiration here), and I can depend in my art school background wife for help, so I'm looking for oppurtunities to play around with it in my writings.

I once wrote a paper [1] with embedded QuickTime videos. It worked really well, but I found out quickly people don't use acroread on macs with QuickTime installed by default. Also, some people still print things out.

[1] http://lampwww.epfl.ch/~mcdirmid/mcdirmid07live.pdf