Circuit-macros-wrapper

I am a wrapper for the "circuit-macros" library by Dwight Aplevich. I provide a shell script, called make_circuit.sh, that given with the m4 circuit description, produces a:

• a tex file with tizk commands that can be either compiled standalone or included in another latex document (with the input command), and
• a pdf drawing of the electric circuit obtained by compiling the tex file.

Requirements

I was tested under MacOSx with Intel architecture. I should be able to run under Linux, too (dpic might need to be recompiled, see below). For Windows, I may possibly work in virtual or emulated enviroments (e.g., CygWin).

• m4 macro processor (e.g., on Mac OSx, brew install m4)
• pdflatex to compile the drawing
• This repository also redistributes a pic interpreter, compiled on an Intel MacOSx, and its source code. If you use Linux or a different architecture, you probably need to recompile it.

Installation

A shell installation script verifies that requirements are satisfied and creates a symbolic link of the shell script in /usr/local/bin/make_circuit.

• Download the repository.
• Place the content of the repository in its final folder (e.g., ~/Documents/circuit-macros), called here INSTALLATION_FOLDER.
• Open a terminal and type:

cd INSTALLATION_FOLDER
sudo sh install.sh

• If you change the location of the folder after the installation, you need to re-run the installation script.

Testing

A demo circuit named RLC.m4 is provided for testing in the folder INSTALLATION_FOLDER/test. To test the functionalities, in a terminal give:

cd INSTALLATION_FOLDER
cd test
make_circuit RLC.m4
open RLC.pdf

If the compilation process does not return errors and you can see the PDF, then you are good to go! In addition, make_circuit produces a latex file that can be included in a latex document. Look at make_circuit.sh for more.

Practical use

In a terminal, navigate in the folder where you have a circuit m4-file to compile and run:

make_circuit RLC.m4

Your compiled diagrams will be available in that same folder.

Take a look to https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~aplevich/Circuit_macros/Circuit_macros.pdf for all the nice features of this excellent package.

References

• Aplevich, D. (2020). M4 Macros for Electric Circuit Diagrams in LATEX Documents, URL: https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~aplevich/Circuit_macros/Circuit_macros.pdf
• https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~aplevich/Circuit_macros/
• https://ctan.org/pkg/circuit-macros?lang=en