Graphics, Figures & Tables ⇒ line with (architectural) scale

[rahulchoudhary]

Gentlemen,

How does one make a line in latex with a sense of scale, unit and direction?

Need to draw some architectural lines,
1. with a unit, like inch (or millimetre)
2. with a scale, like 1:48 (or 1:50 in metric)
3. lines that can be added, like turtle graphics
4. with a geographical direction, like North
5. on a paper like A4 (better A3)

Just saw a few packages on graphics; reading some manuals including (a 172page sampler of) the latex graphics companion; nothing yet that is cohesive.

Best regards,
Rahul

[Johannes_B]

Welcome to the forum,
i am not quite sure what you want to have. Maybe tikz-package is what you are looking for?

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi Rahul,

welcome to the forum!

Here is the manual of the excellent TikZ graphics package: https://texdoc.net/pkg/tikz

Stefan

[rahulchoudhary]

It's a big book with the axis scales all way in chapter "82", mostly geared towards scientific visualisation. reading it; why is it called TikZ? (ticks have venom you know)

Looking for an easy way to make architectural diagrams, just a few rooms in a home to start with. An (abbreviated) textual view of line characteristics like dimension, orientation, etc is all i seek. Civil seems to have over 200 programs now, tried two three programs but they seem rather heavily designed, graphical and restrictive at times. Thought someone would definitely have made a simple tool in the decades prior, since Latex became stable.

Thank you,
Rahul

[Ijon Tichy]

why is it called TikZ

Because "TikZ ist kein Zeichenprogramm" → "1. Introduction" in the manual (link in Sefan's reply). And why not "NikZ ist kein Zeichenprogramm"? See the the author's name.

Looking for an easy way to make architectural diagrams, just a few rooms in a home to start with. An (abbreviated) textual view of line characteristics like dimension, orientation, etc is all i seek.

You should be able to do so already after reading the first tutorial in the manual. However, if this is already too much, you can try pict2e. And if you load pgfpict2e instead of pict2e you would already use pgf (the low-level-layer of TikZ).

[rahulchoudhary]

Thank you, Ijon. went straight from the ToC to Ch82 to figure out scales, like Till mentions in section 1.6, enum1.

Will be reading for some days, including metapost and tb51turt too.

Someone must have definitely built a floor plan in LateX (and one of these packages) in all these decades. I have yet to see something in all these manuals that upfront talks of setting scale to 1:48 or 1/4"=1' and calibrating it. An architectural ruler is different than regular flat scales. mostly i see examples with units like pt, ex, cm and such.