[Tex/LaTex] How to install a current version of TikZ

installingtikz-pgf

TikZ is undergoing lots of development with new features being added, but the versions distributed with standard TeX releases are often a little old. How do I get the latest version? If I want to be sure that I get the latest stable version, how do I do that?

Note: I'm not asking this question for myself, but because a question like this seems to be useful for pointing to it when a new feature of TikZ is mentioned in an answer to some other question. Feel free to post answers for any operating system/TeX distribution combination.

Best Answer

Unless you want to use a development version of TikZ or are stuck with an old TeX distribution, do not manually install TikZ. Simply updating your TeX distribution should give you the newest stable release of TikZ, see How do I update my TeX distribution?

Of course, if you want to get a development version, follow the appropriate answer here.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Problem with installing current version of TikZ.

Not a direct answer to your question, but the current archive of TeX Live 2010 actually contains pgf/tikz v2.10. So

 sudo tlmgr update --all

will (amongst others) download tikz v.2.10 and install it.

EDIT: I think I know what is going on: You have both TeX Live 2009 from the Ubuntu archive and TeX Live 2010 installed. For your normal user $PATH is set such that TL2010 is seen, but for root path doesn't point to the TL2010 installation. So whenever you call sudo texhash it will actually use the TL2009 texhash, which of course causes problems.

[Tex/LaTex] Outlining (filling) glyph outline with text in TikZ

Update 2012-04-10: There's a preliminary package for this on the TeX-SX Launchpad site. You need to run tex on the file pgflibraryshapes.letters.dtx to produce the TikZ/PGF libraries. To generate the font files themselves, you need x2svg.pe font (uses fontforge) to convert to SVG format and svgtopgf.pl font.svg prefix > <fontname>-<fontshape>-paths.tex to convert the SVG to PDF paths (the prefix should be of the form letter@<fontname>@<fontshape>@). Take a look at letter-shapes-test.tex for a sample. The normal and italic shapes for the STIX fonts are already converted. Due to the licensing, they are called stikz!

Do you want something like this?

traced letters

Here's the source code:

\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{%
  svg.path,
  decorations.text,
}

\begin{document}

\begin{tikzpicture}[scale=.3]
\draw[decorate,decoration={text along path,text={AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA}}] svg "M707 0h-255v19c36 0 43 2 55 9c8 4 14 15 14 24c0 15 -7 42 -19 70l-41 94h-262l-46 -114c-5 -13 -9 -30 -9 -42c0 -31 22 -41 70 -41v-19h-199v19c58 6 67 27 126 167l206 488h20l246 -563c28 -65 42 -86 94 -92v-19zM447 257l-116 275l-115 -275h231z";
\draw[xshift=25cm,decorate,decoration={text along path,text={aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa}}] svg "M442 66v-28c-30 -38 -56 -48 -90 -48c-37 0 -59 20 -64 73h-1c-53 -60 -102 -73 -145 -73c-62 0 -105 38 -105 104c0 52 31 91 70 117c30 20 67 39 180 81v54c0 62 -33 90 -78 90c-40 0 -70 -22 -70 -49c0 -18 6 -21 6 -42c0 -19 -20 -41 -46 -41c-21 0 -43 19 -43 46
c0 26 16 58 51 80c28 18 70 30 115 30c56 0 94 -16 118 -45s28 -50 28 -111v-191c0 -46 13 -66 31 -66c16 0 26 5 43 19zM287 127v141c-62 -22 -103 -43 -128 -66c-24 -22 -34 -46 -34 -77c0 -53 30 -77 69 -77c20 0 41 5 58 16c29 20 35 34 35 63z";
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

The method of producing this was fairly straightforward. I loaded the font in fontforge and exported it as an SVG font. That then gave me the fonts as SVG paths. Since TikZ can accept SVG format, I could then cut and paste that in to a TikZ document. That lot could be done beforehand so that there was a file with the paths already specified.

Edit (2012-01-29): I had occasion to want to do this with fairly arbitrary letters so semi-automated it. It's not "production" ready, as there's still the odd bit needed to make it truly usable with no extra tweaking, but it's at the usable-if-you-know-what-you're-doing stage.

Convert the font to SVG. You need fontforge installed. Then the following script, made executable, will invoke fontforge and convert the font specified on the command line to SVG format (output saved in the current directory). Eg if it is saved as x2svg.pe (note the extension) then run as x2svg.pe /path/to/font/amazing-font.otf.
```
#! /usr/bin/fontforge -script

Open($1)
Generate($1:t:r + ".svg")
```

Extract the glyph paths from the resulting XML file. The following Perl script does a reasonable job: it should trim excess whitespace at the start and end as well. Also, one could do with a better naming scheme (I tried unicode, but that got confusing).

perl -MXML::Twig -e '
$xml = XML::Twig->new(
twig_handlers => {
glyph => sub { $n = $_->{att}{"glyph-name"}; $n =~ s/_//g; print  %% "\\svgletter{" . $n  . "}{" . $_->{att}{d} . "}\n";}
}
);
$xml->parsefile("amazing-font.svg");
' > amazing-font.letters.tex

Then in the TeX file, we just need to input this file and use the paths. Here's an example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{svg.path}
\newcommand\svgletter[2]{%
  \expandafter\def\csname svgglyph#1\endcsname{svg "#2"}
}

\input{TeXGyreSchola-Bold.letters}

\def\STOP{stop}
\def\NOTHING{}
\def\empty{}
\newcommand\outline[1]{%
\outlinelet#1\STOP}

\let\thisis\newpage

\newcommand\vfillornewpage{%
  \ifx\thisis\vfill
  \let\thisis\newpage
  \else
  \let\thisis\vfill
  \fi
  \thisis}

\newcommand\outlinelet[1]{%
  \let\next=\vfillornewpage
  \ifx#1\STOP
  \else
  \tikz[baseline=0pt] \draw[scale=0.09,ultra thick] \csname svgglyph#1\endcsname;
  \let\next=\outlinelet
  \fi
  \next}


\begin{document}

\outline{Outline}

\end{document}

With result:

outlined font in TikZ

Obviously, one could be more adventurous in the actual use of the path. Also, it would be good to have a more systematic way of getting the right scale factor (perhaps measuring the height of an "x"). Don't expect kerning!

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Problem with installing current version of TikZ.

[Tex/LaTex] Outlining (filling) glyph outline with text in TikZ

Related Question