LaTeX Graphics Companion, The, 2nd Edition

Product Author Bios

Michel Goossens is at present responsible for scientific text processing at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in Geneva, Switzerland. He is a coauthor of The LaTeX Companion, Second Edition, The LaTeX Graphics Companion, Second Edition, and The LaTeX Web Companion, and also is a past president of the TUG and GUTenberg TeX Users Groups.
     Michel began working at CERN after earning a Ph.D. in physics at Brussels University. At CERN, he soon realized the importance of good documentation and, since the middle 1980s, has been deeply involved with LaTeX. At the same time he has followed closely the development of other generic markup languages and was among the first users of SGML, HTML (invented at CERN), and later XML.

Frank Mittelbach is manager and technical director of the LaTeX3 Project, in which capacity he oversaw the release of LaTeX 2e and more than 15 subsequent releases of this software. In 1989 he joined Electronic Data Systems (EDS), working in a newly formed group for document processing using TeX and other tools. In his current position, he is responsible for concepts and implementation for remote monitoring and management of distributed systems and networks. Frank is a coauthor of The LaTeX Companion, Second Edition, and The LaTeX Graphics Companion, Second Edition, as well as the editor of the book series in which they appear, Tools and Techniques for Computer Typesetting.
     Frank studied mathematics and computer science at the Johannes-Gutenberg University, Mainz. His interest in the automated formatting of complex documents in general, and in LaTeX in particular, goes back to his university days and has become a major interest, perhaps a vocation, and certainly it is now his "second job." He is author or coauthor of many and varied LaTeX extension packages, such as AMS-LaTeX, doc, multicol, and NFSS: the New Font Selection Scheme. In 1990 Frank presented the paper E-TeX: Guidelines for further TeX extensions, which explained the most critical shortcomings of TeX and argued the need for its further development and for research into the many open questions of automated typesetting. This was the first time the topic of change or extension had been openly discussed within the TeX community and, after getting some early opposition, it helped to spawn several important projects, such as eTEX, Omega, and NTS. He is now interested in bringing together the fruits of these TeX extension developments to get a stable, well-maintained, and widely available successor of TeX on which a future LaTeX3 can be based.

Sebastian Rahtz is information manager for Oxford University Computing Services. He is a coauthor of The LaTeX Graphics Companion, Second Edition, and The LaTeX Web Companion.
     Sebastian started life in classics, moved to archaeology, and thence to computing. During the 1980s he taught humanities and archaeological computing at Southampton University, where he also came across TeX. The infection grew strong, and he spent most of the 1990s in TeX-related matters, working latterly for Elsevier Science in production support and in LaTeX to SGML conversion. During that time he was heavily involved in the international and UK TeX Users Groups in many capacities, and worked on a variety of LaTeX packages, most notably hyperref. His allegiance today has largely moved to XML, in which capacity he is Oxford's representative on the Board of the Text Encoding Initiative, but he retains a soft spot for the funny backslash and curly bracket language.

Denis Roegel is associate professor in computer science at the University of Nancy. He has been involved in LaTeX for the past 15 years and has a special interest in technical graphics.
     Denis discovered computers in the early 1980s, and after studying mathematics and physics, he earned an engineering degree from the École Supérieure d'Électricité and a Ph.D. in computer science from the Université Henri Poincaré in Nancy. He later was a postdoctoral fellow at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Herbert Voß is a teacher of mathematics, physics and computer science at a German high school and a lecturer at the Free University of Berlin. For the past three years, he has been heavily involved in maintaining PSTricks and using PostScript from within LaTeX.
     Herbert studied Electrical Engineering and Power Electronics in Hannover and Berlin. His first experience with a computer was in 1970 with an IBM machine and Algol60. The first text-processing program he used, in 1982, was Wordstar on a microcomputer with an 8080 chip. From this time on, he also was heavily involved in programming for various projects with Turbo Pascal. He came back to PostScript and LaTeX at the end of the 90s.

Published Aug 2, 2007 by Addison-Wesley Professional. Part of the Tools and Techniques for Computer Typesetting series. The series editor may be contacted at frank.mittelbach@latex-project.org. The LATEX typesetting system remains a popular choice for typesetting a wide variety of documents, from papers, journal articles, and presentations, to books--especially those that include technical text or demand high-quality composition. This book is the most comprehensive guide to making illustrations in LATEX documents, and it has been completely revised and expanded to include the latest developments in LATEX graphics. The authors describe the most widely used packages and provide hundreds of solutions to the most commonly encountered LATEX illustration problems.

This book will show you how to

• Incorporate graphics files into a LATEX document
• Program technical diagrams using several languages, including METAPOST, PSTricks, and XY-pic
• Use color in your LATEX projects, including presentations
• Create special-purpose graphics, such as high-qualitymusic scores and games diagrams
• Produce complex graphics for a variety of scientific and engineering disciplines

New to this edition:

• Updated and expanded coverage of the PSTricks and METAPOST languages
• Detailed explanations of major new packages for graphing and 3-D figures
• Comprehensive description of the xcolor package
• Making presentations with the beamer class
• The latest versions of gaming and scientific packages

There are more than 1100 fully tested examples that illustrate the text and solve graphical problems and tasks--all ready to run!

All the packages and examples featured in this book are freely downloadable from the Comprehensive TEX Archive Network (CTAN).

The LATEX Graphics Companion, Second Edition, is more than ever an indispensable reference for anyone wishing to incorporate graphics into LATEX. As befits the subject, the book has been typeset with LATEX in a two-color design.

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Table of Contents

List of Figures   xvii
List of Tables   xxi
Preface   xxv

Why LATEX, and why PostScript?   xxvi
How this book is arranged   xxvii
Typographic conventions   xxix
Using the examples   xxxi
Finding all those packages and programs   xxxiii

Chapter 1: Graphics with LATEX   1

1.1   Graphics systems and typesetting   2
1.2   Drawing types   3
1.3   TEX's interfaces   6
1.4   Graphics languages   10
1.5   Choosing a package   21

Chapter 2: Standard LATEX Interfaces   23

2.1   Inclusion of graphics files   23
2.2   Manipulating graphical objects   36
2.3   Line graphics 42

Chapter 3: METAFONT and METAPOST: TEX's Mates   51

3.1   The META language   52
3.2   Differences between METAPOST and METAFONT   60
3.3   Running the META programs   68
3.4   Some basic METAPOST libraries   74
3.5   The METAOBJ package   80
3.6   TEX interfaces: getting the best of both worlds   120
3.7   From METAPOST and to METAPOST   137
3.8   The future of METAPOST   138

Chapter 4: METAPOST Applications   141

4.1   A drawing toolkit   141
4.2   Representing data with graphs   157
4.3   Diagrams   176
4.4   Geometry   189
4.5   Science and engineering applications   196
4.6   3-D extensions   207

Chapter 5: Harnessing PostScript Inside LATEX: PSTricks   213

5.1   The components of PSTricks   214
5.2   Setting keywords, lengths, and coordinates   217
5.3   The pspicture environment   220
5.4   The coordinate system   223
5.5   Grids   224
5.6   Lines and polygons 231
5.7   Circles, ellipses, and curves   240
5.8   Dots and symbols   249
5.9   Filling areas   53
5.10 Arrows   259
5.11 Labels   265
5.12 Boxes   269
5.13 User styles and objects   279
5.14 Coordinates   296
5.15 The PSTricks core   302

Chapter 6: The Main PSTricks Packages   313

6.1   pst-plot--Plotting functions and data   313
6.2   pst-node--Nodes and connections   334
6.3   pst-tree--Typesetting trees   366
6.4   pst-fill--Filling and tiling   383
6.5   pst-3d--Shadows, tilting, and three-dimensional representations   388
6.6   pst-3d plot--3-D parallel projections of functions and data   400
6.7   Short overview of other PSTricks packages   417
6.8   Summary of PSTricks commands and keywords   459

Chapter 7: The XY-pic Package 467

7.1   Introducing XY-pic   467
7.2   Basic constructs   469
7.3   Extensions   474
7.4   Features   478
7.5   Further examples   509

Chapter 8: Applications in Science, Technology, and Medicine   511

8.1   Typographical rules for scientific texts   512
8.2   Typesetting chemical formulae   518
8.3   Alignment and topology plots in bioinformatics   547
8.4   Drawing Feynman diagrams   555
8.5   Typesetting timing diagrams   572
8.6   Electronics and optics circuits   576

Chapter 9: PreparingMusic Scores   587

9.1   Using TEX for scores--An overview   589
9.2   Using MusiXTEX   590
9.3   abc2mtex--Easy writing of tunes   600
9.4   Preprocessors for MusiXTEX   615
9.5   The PMX preprocessor   618
9.6   M-Tx--Music fromTeXt   651
9.7   The music engraver LilyPond   661
9.8   TEXmuse--TEX and METAFONT working together   666

Chapter 10: Playing Games   667

10.1 Chess   668
10.2 Xiangqi--Chinese chess   687
10.3 Go   690
10.4 Backgammon    696
10.5 Card games   698
10.6 Crosswords in various forms   702
10.7 Sudokus   709

Chapter 11: The World of Color   713

11.1 An introduction to color   714
11.2 Colors with LATEX--The color and xcolor packages   719
11.3 Coloring tables   737
11.4 Color slides with LATEX--The beamer class   752

Appendix A: Producing PDF from Various Sources   797

A.1 dvipdfm and dvipdfmx   798
A.2 pst-pdf--From PostScript to PDF   800
A.3 Generating PDF from LATEX   803

Apendix B: LATEX Software and User Group Information   809

B.1 Getting help   809
B.2 How to get those TEX files?   810
B.3 Using CTAN   810
B.4 Finding the documentation on your TEX system   815
B.5 TEX user groups   817

Bibliography   819

Indexes   835