Does LaTeX have a built-in scripting language?

Question

Say I want to draw a simple graph in LaTeX.

I'm interested to know if you can write a for loop or something to create things like lines or squares programmatically in LaTeX.

Answer 1

TikZ is a powerful graphic package. It's a front end for the pgf package and can be used for programming drawings such as graphs. for loops a easy with TikZ.

Have a look at

• The TikZ Example Gallery
• The tikz-pgf category on this site
• The extensive TikZ and PGF manual

If you would like to program more in general, you may consider to use LuaTeX, which allows using Lua as scripting language.

Answer 2

You can can also use the bundle pstricks:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pstricks,pst-plot,pstricks-add}
\begin{document}
\begin{pspicture}(5,5)
\psaxes{->}(0,0)(0,-5)(5,5)
\multido{\iA=-3+1}{7}{%
\psplot[algebraic,linecolor=red,yMaxValue=4]{0}{4}{\iA*x}
}
\end{pspicture}
\end{document}

Answer 3

LaTeX running on top of TeX or pdfTeX or XeTeX is a Turing complete programming language, but you are probably more interested in LuaLaTeX, as that offers Lua, a "modern" scripting language.

Answer 4

In fact TeX is itself a kind of scripting language (and it is a Turing complete programming language cf. Wikipedia article). There are packages that wraps in a neat way bare-bones TeX to supply basic imperative constructs like loops and conditionals: forloop, ifthen (concerning the later see also this discussion). I used to use these packages, one example of mine could be found in this directory, basically it includes bodies of CardBodyN.tex many times in for-loop, the loop itself is located in the document.tex, you're welcome to ask further questions…).