HaTeX 3.6: Texy class, Babel, Fontenc, TikZ and more

It has been a long time since the last release of HaTeX. However, the development of the Haskell LaTeX library has not stopped in all this time. In fact, this release comes full of new features and bug fixes. Below a short description of the changes.

Bug fixes

Let's start having a look to the bugs that have been fixed in HaTeX 3.6:

• The family of autoBraces functions has been fixed. It didn't create correct code (credits to leftaroundabout).
• The verbatim function now expects a Text value instead of LaTeX code (credits to leftaroundabout).
• Size modifiers functions are now protected adequately (reported by jvilar).
• Fixed Color Render instance.

Some of these bugs may have been annoying some people for a long time now. My apologies to this people for the late release.

Texy class

A new class has been defined. Its name: Texy. The definition is as follows:

class Texy t where
  texy :: LaTeXC l => t -> l

This class provides a function to render different types to a LaTeX value. Basically, it defines a pretty-printer which output is LaTeX code. Useful to render vectors, matrices or trees. More details are given in the proposal of this feature.

Babel

Babel is a well-known LaTeX package useful to deal with documents written in languages other than US English. It is a basic feature but it has not been added until now. The module exports a Language type and some functions that use values of this type. See the Text.LaTeX.Packages.Babel module.

Fontenc

A short package to select the desired font encoding of your document. Pretty basic feature now available in HaTeX.

TikZ

Doubtless, the most exciting new feature of this release. TikZ is a frontend for PGF (Portable Graphics Format), a package for creating graphics using scripts embedded in a LaTeX document. Using the TikZ package, writing some simple scripts gives you high quality results. The HaTeX TikZ module exports an interface to create this scripts and embed them in the rest of the HaTeX code, so you can program the graphics that appears in the LaTeX document from Haskell. Two layers of abstraction are provided. First, the module Text.LaTeX.Packages.TikZ exports an interface closer to the original TikZ. With this interface, you have to create paths and then use them to draw, fill, clip, etc. In addition, a PathBuilder monad is provided to create these paths. The alternative interface is much more attractive. Figures are created in a similar way to gloss. A simple, recursive and intuitive datatype describes how the figure looks like. Then, applying a certain function to the figure will generate the TikZ script, that you can insert in the HaTeX code right away. An example is worth a thousand words.

Definition of the figure.

myFigure :: Figure
myFigure = Scale 2 $ Figures
  [ RectangleFilled (0,0) 1 1
  , Colored Green $ RectangleFilled (-1,1) 1 1
  , Colored Red   $ RectangleFilled ( 0,2) 1 1
  , Colored Blue  $ RectangleFilled ( 1,1) 1 1
    ]

Output image.

Learn more about this in the Text.LaTeX.Packages.TikZ.Simple module.

Ending

I will probably be extending the documentation and testing different things. There are a lot of improvements to do in TikZ yet, but I thought that it is a good moment for a release. And, certainly, those suffering from the bugs described above will be thankful. Unfortunately, the HaTeX User's Guide keeps getting outdated.