LATEX provides a basic but limited picture drawing capability.
<#503#>EPIC<#503#>1 is an enhancement to the
picture environment of LATEX which provides a simpler and more
powerful interface. It introduces new commands for drawing solid
lines, dotted lines, dash lines and new environments suitable for
plotting graphs.
However, <#505#>EPIC<#505#> still inherits many of the limitations of
LATEX in picture drawing and hence some of the functions either
take a long time to accomplish or the output is not very nice
looking.
tpic is preprocessor program for use with TEX. It uses a set of
1s graphics commands for drawing pictures. More and
more DVI driver programs supports those specials. They are
becoming a standard set of 2s for DVI files.
However, the major disadvantage of tpic is that the tpic
preprocessor itself is not readily available on most machines. It
is written in yacc and C language. It is mainly for UNIX or
similar system.
<#506#>EEPIC<#506#>, as an extension to both LATEX and <#507#>EPIC<#507#>, tries to
alleviate some of the limitations in LATEX, <#508#>EPIC<#508#> and tpic by
generating tpic 3s using TEX commands instead of
any preprocessor program, but at the same time provides
compatibility with the original commands such that when a DVI
driver which understands tpic 4s are not available,
the documents can still be formatted using standard LATEX and
<#509#>EPIC<#509#>. However, the output probably will not be as good as
originally intended.
Currently, <#510#>EEPIC<#510#> extends LATEX and <#511#>EPIC<#511#> in the following
ways:
- Draws lines in any slopes.
- Draws circles and discs (filled circle) in any radii.
- Draws dotted lines and dash lines in a much faster way and
requires much less TEX internal memory.
- Provides more line thickness options.
Furthermore, <#512#>EEPIC<#512#> introduces several new commands for:
- drawing of ellipsis and filled ellipsis
- drawing of arcs
- drawing of splines (cubic splines using control points)
- drawing of polylines
All the affected commands in LATEX and <#513#>EPIC<#513#> will be discussed
in the subsequent sections. The compatibility issues will be
described in the section~#compat#22>.
In version 1.1, several bugs are fixed, and several commands for
area filled are added.