Excerpts

More than a decade has passed since the publication of the first edition of The LATEX Graphics Companion , and there have been many changes and new developments since 1996. The second edition has seen a major change in the authorship: Frank, Michel and Sebastian have been joined by Denis and Herbert as authors, enriching the book with their knowledge and experience in individual subject areas. As in the first edition, this book describes techniques and tricks of extended LATEX typesetting in the area of graphics and fonts. We examine how to draw pictures with LATEX and how to incorporate graphics files into a LATEX document. We explain how to program pictures using METAFONT and METAPOST, as well as how to achieve special effects with small fragments of embedded PostScript. We look in detail at a whole range of tools for building graphics in TEX itself. TEX is the world's première markup-based typesetting system, and PostScript (on which PDF is based) is the leading language for describing the printed page. We describe how they can produce evenmore beautiful resultswhen they work together. TEX's mathematical capability, its paragraph building, its hyphenation, and its programmable extensibility can cooperate with the graphical flexibility and font-handling capabilities of PostScript and PDF to provide a rich partnership for both author and typesetter. To be able to do justice to the graphics packages that have been further developed since the first edition, we decided to omit a description of PostScript and PDF tools, and of font technologies, from the printed version of this book. This material, which was covered in Chapters 10 and 11 of the first edition, has been substantially expanded and is now freely available (see http://xml.cern.ch/lgc2 ). It covers DVI-to-PostScript drivers, the free program ghostscript to view PostScript and PDF files, tools for manipulating PostScript and PDF files, and suggestions on how to combine the latest font technologies (PostScript Type 1 and OpenType) with LATEX. This volume is not a complete consumer guide to packages. In trying to teach by example, we present hundreds of self-contained code samples of the most useful types of solutions, based on proven and well-known implementations. But, given the space available, we cannot provide a full manual for every package. Our aim is simply to show how easy it is to use a given package and to indicate whether it seems to do what is required--not to dwell on the precise details of syntax or options. Nevertheless, we have described in more detail a few selected tools that we consider especially important. We assume you know some LATEX; you cannot read this book by itself if you have never used TEX before. We recommend that you start with LATEX: A Document Preparation System, Second Edition (Addison-Wesley, 1994), or the Guide to LATEX, Fourth Edition (Addison-Wesley, 2004), and continue with The LATEX Companion, Second Edition (Addison-Wesley, 2004), to explore some of the many (non-graphical) packages available. Why LATEX, and why PostScript? This book is about LATEX, graphics, PostScript, and its child PDF. We believe that the structured approach of a system like LATEX is the best way to use TEX, and LATEX is by far the most widely used TEX format. This means that it attracts contributors who develop new packages, and thus some of what we describe works only in LATEX. We apologize in advance for our LATEX bias to those who appreciate the elegance of the original plain TEX format and its derivatives, and we promise them that most of the packages will work well with any TEX dialect: the delights of systems such as METAPOST, PSTricks, XY-pic, and MusiXTEX are open to all. We also want to explain why we talk about PostScript so much. This language has been well established for almost two decades as an extremely flexible page-description language, and it remains the tool of choice for professional typesetters. Among the features that make it so attractive are these: The quantity, quality, and flexibility of Type 1 fonts The device-independence and portability of files The quality of graphics and the quantity of drawing packages that generate it The facilities for manipulating text The mature color-printing technology The encapsulation conventions that make it easy to embed PostScript graphics The availability of screen-based implementations (e.g., ghostscript/ghostview) PostScript has spawned an enterprising child, the PDF (Portable Document Format) language, used by Adobe Acrobat and now well established as an exchange format for documents on the Web. Designed for screen display with hypertext features, PDF offers a new degree of portability and efficiency. Although not the main subject of this book, we nevertheless mention that LATEX can also produce "rich" PDF documents, and versions of TEX (e.g., pdflatex) that produce PDF directly are available. Again, we apologize to those of you who are disappointed not to read about LATEX's association with Mac's QuickDraw, or the Windows GDI, HPGL, PCL, etc., but with so many packages available, we had to make a choice. Please note that the absence of a given package or tool in this book in no way implies that we consider it less useful or of inferior quality. We do think, though, that we have included a representative set of tools and packages, and we sincerely hope that you will find here one or more subjects to entertain you. How this book is arranged This book is subdivided in two basic ways: by application area and by technique. We suggest that all readers look at Chapter 1 before going any further, because it introduces how we think about graphics and summarizes some techniques developed in later chapters. We also suggest that you read Chapter 2, which covers the LATEX standard graphics package, since the tools for including graphics files will be needed often. Chapter 2 also covers pict2e, a package that reimplements LATEX's picture environment using PostScript, and a further extension curve2e. Together these packages not only do away with most of the limitations inherent in the standard version of LATEX's picture, but also offer new and powerful commands to draw arcs and curves with mininal effort. We have tried to make it possible to read each of the other chapters separately; you may prefer to go straight to the chapters that cover your subject area or look at those that describe a particular tool. Two chapters each are dedicated to the generic systems METAPOST and PSTricks. 3 METAFONT and METAPOST: TEX's Matesshows how to exploit the power of TEX's META languages (Knuth's METAFONT and its PostScript-based extension METAPOST). After introducing the basic functions, the basic METAPOST libraries are described, as well as available TEX interfaces and miscellaneous tools and utilities. 4 METAPOST Applicationsintroduces the METAPOST toolkit, and explains how to use METAPOST's unparalleled expressive power for describing many types of graphs, diagrams, and geometric constructs. Applications in the areas of science and engineering, 3-D representations, posters, etc. conclude the overview. 5 Harnessing PostScript Inside LATEX: PSTrickswalks the reader through the various components of the PSTricks language, looking at such things as defining the coordinate system, lines and polygons, circles, ellipses and curves, arrows, labels, fill areas, and much more. 6 The Main PSTricks Packagestakes you even deeper into the world of PSTricks. Armed with the knowledge gained in Chapter 5, the reader will find here detailed descriptions of the most common PSTricks packages--in particular, pst-plot for plotting functions and data; pst-node formastering nodes and their connections; pst-tree for creating tree diagrams; pst-fill for filling and tiling areas; pst-3d for creating 3-Deffects, such as shadows and tilting; and pst-3dplot for handling 3-D functions and data sets. The chapter ends with a summary of PSTricks commands and keywords. The next four chapters discuss problems in special application areas and survey more packages: 7 The XY-pic Packageintroduces a package that goes to great lengths to define a notation for many kinds of mathematics diagrams and implements it in a generic and portable way. 8 Applications in Science, Technology, and Medicinelooks at chemical formulae and bonds, applications in bioinformatics, Feynman diagrams, timing diagrams, and electronic and optics circuits. 9 Preparing Music Scoresfirst describes the principles of the powerful MusiXTEX package. Then several preprocessors providing a more convenient interface are introduced: abc for folk tunes, PMX for entering polyphonic music, and M-Tx (an offspring of PMX) for dealing with multi-voice lyrics in scores. We also take a short look at LilyPond, a modern music typesetter written in C++, and say a few words about TEXmuse. 10 Playing Gamesis for those who use LATEX for play as well as for work. It shows you how to describe chess games and typeset chess boards (the usual and oriental variants). This chapter also describes how to handle Go, backgammon, and card games. We conclude with crosswords in various forms and Sudokus, including how to typeset, solve, and generate them. Our last chapter addresses an area of general interest: color, and some of its common uses in LATEX. 11 The World of Colorstarts with a short general introduction to color. Next comes an overview of the xcolor package and the colortbl package, that is based on xcolor. The final part discusses the beamer class for producing color slides with LATEX. Appendix A describes ways to generate PDF from LATEX. Appendix B introduces CTAN and explains how to download the LATEX packages described in this book. As mentioned earlier, material about PostScript and PDF tools, as well as information about how to use PostScript and OpenType fonts with LATEX, is available as supplementary material (see http://xml.cern.ch/lgc2 ),which covers the following subjects: PostScript Fonts and Beyonddescribes the ins and outs of using PostScript fonts with LATEX. It also looks at the latest developments on how to integrate OpenType fonts by creating TEX-specific auxiliary files (TEX metrics, virtual fonts, etc.) or by reading the font's characteristics directly in the OpenType source. PostScript and PDF Toolsstarts with a short introduction to the PostScript, PDF, and SVG languages. It then describes some freely available programs, in particular dvips and pdflatex to generate PostScript and PDF, ghostscript and ghostview to manipulate and view PostScript and PDF, plus a set of other tools that facilitate handling PostScript and PDF files and conversions. Finding all those packages and programs All of the packages and programs described in this book are freely available in public software archives; a few are in the public domain, but most are protected by copyright and available to you under an open-source license. Some programs are available only in source form or work only on certain computer platforms, and you should be prepared for a certain amount of "getting your hands dirty" in some cases. We also cannot guarantee that later versions of packages or programs will give results identical to those in our book. Many of these packages and programs remain under active development, and new or changed versions appear several times a year; we completed this book in spring 2007, and tested the examples with the versions current at that time. In Appendix B we give full details on how to access CTAN sites and how to download files using the Internet. You can also purchase the TEX Collection DVD from one of the TEX Users Groups. This DVD contains implementations of TEX for various systems, many packages and fonts, in particular it provides you with all the LATEX packages described in this book and The LATEX Companion, Second Edition . Some programs (such as the ones described in the music chapter) are not available on CTAN (or the DVD) and must be downloaded from the location indicated in the text. Excerpted from The Latex Graphics Companion by Michel Goossens, Frank Mittelbach, Sebastian Rahtz, Denis Roegel, Herbert Vob All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.