I'd like to know what LuaTeX offers in terms of graphics: I'm mostly interested in pstricks and TikZ/pgfplots. Could it help TikZ run faster? Would it help TikZ handle 3D non-orthotropic figures (which is not available yet and is CPU consuming)? What could it bring to the pstricks package users?
[Tex/LaTex] LuaTeX and graphics [TikZ/pstricks]
luatexpstrickstikz-pgf
Related Solutions
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?
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
fontforgeinstalled. 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 asx2svg.pe(note the extension) then run asx2svg.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";} } ); $xml->parsefile("amazing-font.svg"); ' > amazing-font.letters.texThen in the TeX file, we just need to input this file and use the paths. Here's an example:
\documentclass{article} \usepackage{tikz} \usetikzlibrary{svg.path} \newcommand\svgletter[2]{% \expandafter\def\csname svgglyph#1\endcsname{svg "#2"} } \input{TeXGyreSchola-Bold.letters} \def\STOP{stop} \def\NOTHING{} \def\empty{} \newcommand\outline[1]{% \outlinelet#1\STOP} \let\thisis\newpage \newcommand\vfillornewpage{% \ifx\thisis\vfill \let\thisis\newpage \else \let\thisis\vfill \fi \thisis} \newcommand\outlinelet[1]{% \let\next=\vfillornewpage \ifx#1\STOP \else \tikz[baseline=0pt] \draw[scale=0.09,ultra thick] \csname svgglyph#1\endcsname; \let\next=\outlinelet \fi \next} \begin{document} \outline{Outline} \end{document}With result:
Obviously, one could be more adventurous in the actual use of the path. Also, it would be good to have a more systematic way of getting the right scale factor (perhaps measuring the height of an "x"). Don't expect kerning!
the labels are set on TeX side and it is difficult to handle such large numbers. Use it this way:
\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents*}{data.dat}
0 0
100 10000
200 15000
300 20000
400 50000
500 80000
600 100000
700 150000
800 160000
\end{filecontents*}
\usepackage{pst-plot}
\begin{document}
\readdata{\data}{data.dat}
\psset{xunit=0.11mm,yunit=0.15mm,
ylabelFactor=$\times10^3$,labelFontSize=\footnotesize,mathLabel=false}
\pstScalePoints(1,1){}{1.e3 div}
\begin{pspicture}(-80,-30) (1000,310)
\psaxes[axesstyle=frame,Dx=100,dx=100,Dy=50,dy=50,ticksize=0 4pt](1000,300)
\listplot [linewidth=1.5pt,linecolor=red] {\data}
\end{pspicture}
\end{document}
and the same with a local unit change for y (without using \pstScalePoints:
\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents*}{data.dat}
0 0
100 10000
200 15000
300 20000
400 50000
500 80000
600 100000
700 150000
800 160000
\end{filecontents*}
\usepackage{pst-plot}
\begin{document}
\readdata{\data}{data.dat}
\psset{xunit=0.11mm,yunit=0.15mm,
ylabelFactor=$\times10^3$,labelFontSize=\footnotesize,mathLabel=false}
\begin{pspicture}(-80,-30) (1000,310)
\psaxes[axesstyle=frame,Dx=100,dx=100,Dy=50,dy=50,ticksize=0 4pt](1000,300)
\listplot [yunit=0.001,plotstyle=values,rot=90] {\data}
\listplot [yunit=0.001,linewidth=1.5pt,linecolor=red] {\data}
\end{pspicture}
\end{document}
Best Answer
In principle, LuaTeX offers more flexibility, and in particular more speed, for Tikz,
pgfplots, etc. This is because the work (especially floating-point maths) is going to be much easier to do in Lua than in TeX. On the other hand, PStricks uses the PostScript language for the hard work, and it already offers native support for a lot of this work. So there is much less scope for assisting there. (Herbert may have more to say on PStricks, I suspect.)