It’s been quite a lot of time since I’ve written anything here; I hope that I will be able to put things more often at this blog. But ad rem.
Today I looked at http://www.texample.net/tikz/, which is a very good place to look at for all fans of tikz (like me
), and found something really, really great: an example of a very new 3dplot package (links to the package and docs are under that link). There were two features I miss from tikz: easy Bézier curves like in Metapost (i.e., without having to state the control points explicitly) and three-dimiensional arcs. Well, there is only one left (the former one).
What’s the point? Especially when you typeset educational materials (and I do it from time to time), you may want to draw a picture of some geometrical solid. The tikz package lets you draw points in 3d space in an isometric view very easily, so it’s not a problem—at least, until you want to have an angle, usually denoted by an arc, in your picture. Obviously, under an affine transformation, an arc of the circle becomes some arc of some ellipse, and calculating which one is rather tedious. The 3dplot package does it for you! (I haven’t tried it yet, but I will do it for sure when I need such a feature, which probably means next few weeks.)
Many, many kudos to Jeff Hein for this one!
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