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Welcome to the qcircuit wiki main page! Hopefully this wiki provides useful help, documentation, and other information for the use of qcircuit.
This project was originally started by Bryan Eastin and Steve Flammia while working at the University of New Mexico, New Mexico, USA. Their contributions have helped scientists within the quantum information community typeset quantum circuits in a rapid and effective manner. The entire community is indebted to them for their work.
Recently, students affiliated with the Center for Quantum Information and Control had the idea to "reboot" the project. With the advent of more effective means of collaboration for coding such as GitHub, as well as new graphics packages for LaTeX/TeX such as Tikz, we feel the time is right to begin updating qcircuit.
The first place to go to get help on using qcircuit is to download and compile the Qtutorial.tex file. We also have a FAQ page with a few questions and answers.
Should you discover a bug, or have an idea for a new feature, please submit an Issue.
If you need to contact a human, please visit the user page for Travis-S. Steve Flammia is on GitHub as user sflammia.
Where We Are
Recently, we have worked on converting the original qcircuit.tex file to a .sty file, which essentially turns qcircuit into a TeX package. We then recently (24 June 2014) received confirmation that qcircuit was on CTAN. Thus, users are able to use whatever TeX package manager came with their TeX distribution to download qcircuit to their computer.
Where Are Going
Our current direction is to update qcircuit to be compatible with current LaTeX drawing packages. In particular, the TikZ package has emerged as a helpful way to do drawing; making qcircuit compatible with that would enable further development down the line.
For now, we plan to see how much of qcircuit can be rewritten "under the hood" without having to change the user interface. Perhaps some of the issues raised in the original Qtutorial.tex file can be addressed in this way. Or perhaps not.
This repository has two main branches: master and dev. The master branch is, as the name suggests, the most stable branch. The dev branch serves as a stop before the master branch. Changes should be committed to the dev branch first, and then, upon verifying few things break (can never get rid of all of them!), the dev branch can be merged into master.