The Communications of the TEX Users Group Volume 29 ... - TUG

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Smart ways of drawing PSTricks figures Manjusha Susheel Joshi Bhaskaracharya Institute of Mathematics Law College Road, Pune 411004, India manjusha dot joshi at gmail dot com www dot bprim dot org Abstract We present a method of using PSTricks in conjunction with free software packages for interactive drawing (Dr. Geo, Dia, Gnuplot, Xfig) to produce various types of figures, via exporting as TEX and modifying the result. 1 Drawing geometric figures In our institute, we arrange various training programmes for International Maths Olympiad competition, publish the journal Bona Mathematica, and produce other mathematical study materials. For all these we need to draw complex geometric figures. 1.1 Accuracy requirements All the mathematical material is in L ATEX format. Faculties require .eps files to include in their question papers, notes, books and articles. In figures, the text used for labels, etc., must all be in the same font. The material is widely distributed among students and others, so from the printing point of view, the figures should be very accurate. We want to produce such exact figures while not spending excessive amounts of time on drawing them. Also, these figures must be usable in the L ATEX sources. We want to minimize issues such as license, cost, and support and therefore maximize availability of the software. In general, use of free software is encouraged in the institute. For drawing geometric figures, the free software package Dr. Geo (home page http://www.gnu.org/ software/dr-geo) is well-suited for us. Figure 1 shows a typical session in progress. Other free software GUI drawing programs include Dia for flowcharts, among other purposes (http://www.gnome. org/projects/dia), Gnuplot for function plotting (http://www.gnuplot.info), and Xfig for general drawing (http://www.xfig.org). 1.2 Convert figures directly to PostScript? If a figure file is generated by another software program, converted to ps or eps by an external utility, and then inserted in the L ATEX file, we have observed that the font type and size of labels in the converted Figure 1: Drawing a figure in Dr. Geo file is different from that in the L ATEX file, and the sharpness of the figure may not be good. Of course we wish to avoid such problems. 1.3 Export figures as TEX As an alternative to PostScript export, software such as the above supports exporting figures in TEX format. Advantages of this approach include: • The ‘Export as TEX file’ options generate the entire code for users. • The resulting fig.tex file has PSTricks code for the figure, which is editable. • Users may not know every PSTricks command, but they can easily modify the code in useful ways knowing only a small set of commands. • Users need not calculate (x, y) co-ordinates, as they are already generated according to the figure. One important thing not to worry about. 1.4 Step by step Here is our process, step by step. 444 TUGboat, Volume 29 (2008), No. 3 — Proceedings of the 2008 Annual Meeting
P3 P3 P3 Q2 Q2 Q2 � � W3 W3 W3 Z2 Z2 Z2 � Q3 Q3 Q3 � Z3 Z3 Z3 P1 P1 P1 � O � G � � � N Smart ways of drawing PSTricks figures Q1 Q1 Q1 � Z1 Z1 Z1 � � H W1 W1 W1 � � P2 P2 P2 � �� W2 W2 W2 Figure 2: Nine point circle, drawn with modified PSTricks code • Open a graphical tool for drawing geometric figures, e.g., one of those mentioned above. Draw the figure. • Label the objects at appropriate places, as near by as possible. Save. • Export as a TEX figure. • Open it in any editor or (L A)TEX IDE to edit. We often use Kile (kile.sourceforge.net). • Change all the labels in the figure to be in math mode, i.e., enclosed in $...$, especially labels of vertices. • If the positions of labels are not perfect, then adjust the x and y coordinates as needed, in the neighbourhood of the x and y which have been calculated by Dr. Geo. 2 Sequence of drawing objects matters Sometimes two objects will overlap, so that the object drawn earlier becomes invisible. To see an example, refer to Figure 2, a ‘nine point circle’. Looking at the points of intersection at W1 and W3, we can see the construction clearly, namely, Z2Z3 ⊥ Z1W1 and Z1Z2 ⊥ Z3W3. However, at point W2, the red dot marker has obscured that Z1Z3 ⊥ Z2W2. If the dot were drawn before the lines, the lines would be visible, as they are at W1 and W3. (We intentionally left this discrepancy in the figure for expository purposes.) Drawing sequence is an issue with opaque colors. With transparent colors, the sequence typically does not matter. 3 Example Figure 2 also serves as a general example showing the success of our workflow. In the figure, nine red points can be seen. These points are constructed using Dr. Geo, i.e., Dr. Geo was responsible for correctly finding these nine intersecting points. With PSTricks, one can use different colours and textures to highlight points and regions, and place labels at the appropriate co-ordinates and use the same font as L ATEX file in which figure will be inserted. In this case, we wanted to use the figure on the front page of a journal, and so we needed to make it more colourful. In a sense, Dr. Geo works here as a front end for PSTricks. With the help of such a front end, users can save considerable time in calculating the co-ordinates for the figure. To learn about the actual mathematics of the nine point circle, seehttp://www.csm.astate.edu/ Ninept.html. TUGboat, Volume 29 (2008), No. 3 — Proceedings of the 2008 Annual Meeting 445
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The Communications of the TEX Users
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TUG2008 Proceedings University Coll
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TUG 2008—program Monday, July 21
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At the reception. Around the front
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Taco Hoekwater, inside the Beamish
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Another, equally large, disadvantag
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This “saves” the original \text
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Figure 5: Macro result pushed back
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TEXworks: Lowering the barrier to e
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Direct and reverse synchronization
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The TEXnical terms used to describe
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6.2 An orthogonal implementation On
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In fact, the text editors and the v
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albanian greek norwegian belarusian
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input manually, but are generated b
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1.2 Commercially available software
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If L ATEX can fit the snippet into
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Pascal MetaPost, but using CWEB as
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The TEX-Lua mix Hans Hagen Pragma A
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\setbox0=\hbox{x}\the\wd0 In Lua we
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start.char = uc return true end end
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stream-based approach, this time th
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example is support for OpenType fon
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