2

While there's surely many other approaches for drawing geometrical shapes, I've decided to use Latex for this purpose. My search led me to the package TikZ. I've found a nice list of examples at

http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/

and for my specific purpose, under the geometry area.

From these, the morley triangle is a first step toward what I try to draw but upon compilation I'm being told that tkz-2d doesn't exist, plus a bunch of other warning / error messages such as division by zero. Even opening the example in overleaf leads to a compilation error. So I tried to install tkz-2d following

How can I install the tikz-cd package on Ubuntu?

but none of the proposed solution worked (ubuntu 16.04). At How to install tkz-2d in TeXLive 2010?, I find that tkz-2d has been replaced by tkz-euclide, so I go ahead and replace tkz-2d by the newer tkz-euclide. Compilation passes and I have a pdf with the triangle but still with many warnings / errors along the way (mainly Undefined control sequence).

I am just at the crossroad of following the TikZ path (preferred) or moving elsewhere, so I have these straightforward questions: is TikZ still alive? Is it worth diving in the 1000+pages pgfmanual.pdf or will it be painful to track the evolution of outdated packages (e.g. tkz-2d) and try to run outdated examples?

Community
  • 1
calocedrus
  • 171
  • 2
    Welcome! Compilation doesn't pass if you get errors. TikZ is very much alive! That is partly why you find outdated examples. But note that the tkz- packages are not part of tikz. tkz is based on tikz, but you can use tikz without using anything from tkz at all. (I've never used tkz except occasionally to answer a question, in part because the documentation is not written in a language I understand. But I use tikz a lot.) – cfr Feb 24 '17 at 01:13
  • You can post links as text and somebody will turn them into links for you. It is on tex.stackexchange is not of much help to anybody, I'm afraid. Please also consider adding your code to the question, if you want specific help with it. (I'm not clear whether you want that or not.) I've never heard of tkz-2d, by the way, but only tkz-euclide. So the latter is not exactly new. – cfr Feb 24 '17 at 01:15
  • 2
    Examples on http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/ can be very helpful. However, very many of them are out of date and their original authors have no way of updating or fixing them. Things seem to get added from time to time, but I'm not clear that existing examples get updated at all. Of course, many answers here may also be out of date, but people do make an effort to update things, especially when somebody reports a problem. The TikZ manual is very good. You do not need to read all of it. Start with the tutorials in Section 1. Then look up bits you need. – cfr Feb 24 '17 at 01:18
  • @cfr, thank you for your comments and feedback. I had inserted the exact link about tkz-2d being replaced by tkz-euclide but was prevented to post more than 2 links due to my limited reputation. It seems I can add a partial link here so here it is: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/11607/how-to-install-tkz-2d-in-texlive-2010/11614#11614 – calocedrus Feb 24 '17 at 02:54
  • That has lots of invisible characters (not just text). I think I found them all ... – cfr Feb 24 '17 at 03:13

1 Answers1

2

While it appears strange to myself to answer my own question, I think I can positively say that yes, TikZ is very much alive: this book "TikZpour l'impatient" (TikZ for the impatient):

http://math.et.info.free.fr/TikZ/bdd/TikZ-Impatient.pdf

by Tisseau and Duma dates feb. 11th 2017! Even if one doesn't read french, the examples speak for themselves: http://math.et.info.free.fr/TikZ/Exemples1.html

They can be downloaded at http://math.et.info.free.fr/TikZ/bdd/Exemples.zip

Of the few examples I have tried so far, all compile with no complain. I think I have found my way.

calocedrus
  • 171