Documentation

Documentation on axodraw2 is available at arXiv.org and ctan.org. It is also provided by the axodraw2 package in both of the main TeX distributions, TeXLive and MiKTeX.

Text modes

Postscript text mode

Any Postscript text present in the graph will be ignored by this plugin (a warning message is displayed if a latex->dvips export/preview is attempted with some Postscript text present in the graph).

LaTeX text mode

In LaTeX text mode, the user may enter a text string that will appear only in the LaTeX output file and any files created from it via latex -> dvips. Like that all the commands known to LaTeX in math mode are available to the user. If the text is rolled over by the cursor, the corresponding LaTeX text is displayed in a pop-up window on top of the canvas. Note that the LaTeX text string will automatically be put between $ signs, so the text will always be in LaTeX math mode. If you want a normal font in LaTeX text mode, you should use {\rm }. Note also that your input here is the only possible source of errors in your LaTeX source code. If you get any LaTeX compilation errors, check your LaTeX text objects first. In edit mode, the user may choose the LaTeX font size and the alignment with respect to the current position of the text object. You can also specify rotation angles for LaTeX texts (rotations are implemented using the LaTeX pstricks package).

Importing LaTeX files

This JaxoDraw plugin allows to import existing LaTeX files, even if they were not originally created by JaxoDraw. However, only commands that are known to JaxoDraw are actually recognized (that are commands that are used when exporting to a LaTeX file), unknown commands will be silently ignored. The commands known to JaxoDraw are:

(see the axodraw user guide for documentation on these commands [3]). In addition, the following LaTeX commands are required:

If these ones are not found in the file to be imported, the import process is abandoned with a warning message.

Due to the specific algorithm internally used by JaxoDraw to draw triangles, the commands \GTri and \CTri will work only when the imported LaTeX file has been generated from JaxoDraw itself. Otherwise they will be ignored. Moreover, because of rounding errors in the export/import routines, sometimes the imported graphs may be slightly different from the original ones (possible differences being the number of wiggles/windings of photon/gluon objects and the position of objects). These differences are usually of one unit. Lines that start with %%\JaxoComment will be read in as a description of the graph while lines of the form %%\JaxoScale{scale} allow to read in a floating point value scale factor which is used internally by JaxoDraw to convert Java coordinates into LaTeX coordinates. If it is not given, the scale factor defaults to 1. Finally lines of the form %%\JaxoDrawID: are identifiers used by JaxoDraw to reconstruct some objects.

Known problems

If a LaTeX text object is present at the edge of a graph then the bounding box of a "LaTeX -> EPS" export is most probably not correct. This manifests itself by a "broken" text, i.e., a thin white line is crossing the text. Basically, there is no way for us to estimate the extension of a text after latex compilation, so the only workaround is to adjust the bounding box by hand.

Tips and tricks

• Note that Postscript files produced by Export - EPS are considerably larger in size than the same files generated via latex -> dvips. This is due to the way how Java handles the Postscript printing internally. Keep this in mind if you want to include a bunch of small figures in your document: it is then probably preferable to use the LaTeX output.
• Instead of producing EPS figures and including them into your document, you may as well cut-and-paste the LaTeX output of JaxoDraw into your own LaTeX source code. Like that you may avoid the proliferation of numerous Postscript files to be distributed with your source code. Note however that you will have to include axodraw2 in the header of your LaTeX file (put \usepackage{axodraw2} somewhere before \begin{document}) and you will probably have to distribute the axodraw2.sty file along with your source code because it is not part of any standard LaTeX distribution.

History

The 1.x series of JaxoDraw used the original axodraw latex package written by Jos Vermaseren to generate Feynamn diagrams. The naming of JaxoDraw is a reminiscent of this origin.

In the 2.x series of JaxoDraw, the axodraw style file was replaced with axodraw2.sty (i.e. axodraw for Java). It was based on axodraw and was written mainly by John Collins specifically for the JaxoDraw project. The name has been changed to avoid any backward compatibility issues with old documents that use the original axodraw.sty.

In both the 1.x and 2.x series of JaxoDraw the LaTeX export/import functionality was integrated into the main program. With the release 3.0 of JaxoDraw the JLaTeXMath library was used as the underlying LaTeX engine. The axodraw2-specific part of the code was instead pulled out into this plugin, so the the original functionality is still available to JaxoDraw users.