eschpic

IEC Electrical drawing system based on m4/dpic/TikZ/LaTeX

Inspired by J. D. Aplevich's excellent Circuit_macros package. Eschpic also makes use of Aplevich's interpreter of Kernighan's Pic language, dpic, which has some useful extensions over the GNU version.

Although it's based on similar technology (pic/m4/TikZ/LaTeX), eschpic is rather different to Circuit_macros:

• Targeted at IEC-style electrical drawings for industrial and automation purposes, rather than EEs
• Produces an entire standalone document, with titleblocks etc.
• (Somewhat) simpler syntax and drawing style, with self-describing key-value parameters

Features

• Handles wire references automatically; use hyperref package to allow following them between sheets
• Variety of pre-existing IEC symbols; extensive and customisable generic "contacts" macro for automatically drawing pushbuttons/selector switches/contactors/relays/isolators etc.
• Follows pic and Circuit_macros drawing style, by automatically moving current drawing position and direction to end of previous component or wire.
• However, tries to maintain conventional electrical drawing component orientation (whether vertical or horizontal), so e.g. contact symbols are always drawn the "right" way up.
• wireGroup() macro to easily draw and label multiple wires at consistent spacing and orientation without having to describe their paths individually; wires always kept in top-to-bottom, left-to-right order
• Automatic generation of a Bill of Materials table at the end of the document, if part numbers for each component are given. Hyperref is used to navigate to the component by clicking from the BOM table.

Documentation

Documentation is currently lacking, although reasonable parameter descriptions are provided for each macro inside the m4 files. For now, look at the testdoc.m4 file to see an example.

Use

The repository is already set up with a makefile and example drawing (testdoc.m4) to try out. It demonstrates a couple of key features, including wire referencing, labelling and the Bill of Materials table.

Ensure the following is installed:

• m4
• LaTeX (pdflatex)
• TikZ
• dpic

Simply typing "make" should produce a PDF file. You may need to run it again to update wire references/locations after the first pass.