math­spic – A Perl fil­ter pro­gram for use with PiCTeX

Math­sPIC(Perl) is a de­vel­op­ment of the ear­lier Math­sPIC(DOS) pro­gram, now im­ple­mented as a Perl script, be­ing much more portable than the ear­lier pro­gram. Math­sPIC parses a plain text in­put file and gen­er­ates a plain text out­put-file con­tain­ing com­mands for draw­ing a di­a­gram. Ver­sion 1.0 pro­duces out­put con­tain­ing PiCTeX and (La)TeX com­mands, which may then be pro­cessed by plain TeX or LaTeX in the usual way. Math­sPIC also out­puts a com­pre­hen­sive log-file. Math­sPIC fa­cil­i­tates cre­at­ing fig­ures us­ing PiCTeX by pro­vid­ing an en­vi­ron­ment for ma­nip­u­lat­ing named points and also al­lows the use of vari­ables and maths (ad­vance, mul­ti­ply, and di­vide)—in short—it takes the pain out of PiCTeX. Both the orig­i­nal DOS ver­sion and the new Perl ver­sion are avail­able.