Caesar Cipher Wheel for Newbie

Question

I found this solution for making a Caesar Cipher Wheel: How to create a Caesar's encryption disk using LaTeX

but I have never used LaTex before.

Most of the solutions produced errors when I used on online editor such as https://www.tutorialspoint.com/online_latex_editor.php due to a missing standalone.cls

The one solution that did not produce an error is this one: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/103366/176585 but the letters are in anti-clockwise order.

I don't know enough about what I'm doing to make the letters in the working version display clockwise.

Please could someone either tell me how to modify the working version or get the other versions working using an online editor?

For example this answer works fine in overleaf: https://www.overleaf.com/read/mtgktdqdjhcx — samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz, Dec 11 '18 at 15:15
Welcome to TeX.SX! Please help us help you and add a minimal working example (MWE) that illustrates your problem. Reproducing the problem and finding out what the issue is will be much easier when we see compilable code, starting with \documentclass{...} and ending with \end{document}. — Andrew Uzzell, Dec 11 '18 at 15:15
Using \documentclass{article} instead of \documentclass[tikz]{standalone} (where the document class file is missing for some reason) and loading the tikz package afterwards with \usepackage{tikz} should do the trick. For the other example, you may use \node at (-\x* instead of \node at (\x* as a simple solution. — epR8GaYuh, Dec 11 '18 at 15:17

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 11 '18 at 17:53

To be able to get the answers from the linked question working with the given editor on www.tutorialspoint.com and producing the desired result, you have to do some small modifications.

The answers by @Qrrbrbirlbel and @m0nhawk are using the standalone document class. As the corresponding class file - namely standalone.cls - does not seem to be available with the TeX Live 2016 installation used by your online editor, you have to switch to another document class. The easiest solution would be to use the article class:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}

This has to replace \documentclass[tikz]{standalone} in the answer by @Qrrbrbirlbel and the first two code lines of @m0nhawk's answer.

@Toscho already uses the article class, but you pointed out that your wheel should be clockwise. One easy way to circumvent this is by replacing

\node at (\x*360/26+360/26+180/26:6){\Alph{encrypted}};
\node at (\x*360/26+360/26+180/26:8){\Alph{original}};

with

\node at (-\x*360/26+360/26+180/26:6){\Alph{encrypted}};
\node at (-\x*360/26+360/26+180/26:8){\Alph{original}};

The article class is normally used for regular documents which should be typeset in A4 format for example. Being one of the standard document classes, it should be available on most systems.

The standalone class produces a document whose dimensions are only as big as needed by the content - and is often used to create complex images as standalone PDF files to be included later into a normal document without requiring to typeset this image on every compilation run for the main document. As it is no standard class, it might be missing in some installations.

Caesar Cipher Wheel for Newbie

1 Answers1