Dear Sage developers,
This is a poll for making dot2tex a standard spkg.
- [ ] Yes, make dot2tex a standard spkg
- [ ] No, keep it as optional
Description of dot2tex
----------------------
dot2tex [1] is a small pure python module (5000 lines), whose purpose
is to give graphs generated by Graphviz a more LaTeX friendly look and
feel. This is accomplished by converting xdot output from Graphviz to
a series of PSTricks or PGF/TikZ commands.
The current dot2tex spkg weights 900K. It could be trimmed down to
300K by removing PNG's that are only used for testing.
Usage in Sage and rationale for making dot2tex a standard spkg
--------------------------------------------------------------
dot2tex+graphviz are used quite intensively to visualize combinatorial
data like crystal graphs and the like (see e.g. [2]). In fact, that's
one of the very first feature beginners in (algebraic) combinatorics
want to play with. So it would be nice to reduce as much as possible
the prerequisites. Currently they are:
(1) Installing graphviz
(2) Installing dot2tex with sage -i dot2tex
(3) Having a latex distribution that includes a recent enough version
of pgf/tikz (2010 or later?)
Including graphviz into Sage has been discussed a couple times;
however there are a priori licence issues (also the graphviz spkg has
been broken for a while, and nobody stood up to fix that). That's not
so bad because it's usually very easy to install graphviz on one's
operating system; in fact it's often already there.
We can hope that (3) will finally fade out by itself.
Making dot2tex a standard spkg would save on step (2); granted it's a
relatively trivial step, but it often became a burden in practice
because our beginners then needed to have a shell, to have network
access, ...
Making dot2tex standard would also simplify a bit the doctest
"optional" logic: we would only need to mark as optional those tests
that actually require graphviz. Again a small step, but in practice
#14594 would have been detected earlier if dot2tex had been standard.
Cheers,
Nicolas
[1] http://www.fauskes.net/code/dot2tex/
[2] http://wiki.sagemath.org/combinat/CoolPictures
--
Nicolas M. Thiéry "Isil" <nthi...@users.sf.net>
http://Nicolas.Thiery.name/
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