Thursday, March 27, 2014

Papeeria News, Mar 27

TL; DR: PGF 3.0 and graphs drawing; project sharing UI updates

PGF/TikZ 3.0

Did you know you could create pretty complex vector drawings in TeX? There is a library for that! Its name is PGF/TikZ and it is cool. Just look at the collection of examples of documents using PGF/TikZ

PGF 3.0 which was released in December 2013 adds a number of interesting features, and today it is available in Papeeria. Even more, previous PGF 2.10 is available too and you can choose which one do you need. This setting is available in Compile button options and it is persistent for a project. By default we use older PGF, to keep your existing projects as is

If you want to have a look at some new features introduced in PGF/TikZ 3.0 or to get started in case if you didn't know about PGF, try our new PGF/TikZ 3.0 Showcase template.

Don't forget to choose Use PGF 3.0 option when compiling this template!

PGF/TikZ 3.0 template

Particularly interesting is a new graph notation which resembles one used by Graphviz/Dot. A simple graph may look as follows:

\graph [nodes={circle, draw, inner sep=1.5pt}]
1 -> { 
    2 -> 3 -> { 
        4 -> 5, 
        6 -> { 7, 8, 9 }
    }, 
    10 -> 11 -> { 12, 13 } 
}
We don't yet support graph layout algorithms which require LuaTeX, but we'll add them in the future.

Project sharing UI

It turned out that in our UI project public/private/archived flag was in one place while collaborators list lived in another one. We merged these controls in a single UI. Now they both sit in Project Sharing Settings dialog.

Updated project sharing dialog