{"id":492,"date":"2016-03-28T21:52:31","date_gmt":"2016-03-28T21:52:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.piglets.org\/blog\/?p=492"},"modified":"2016-03-28T21:58:01","modified_gmt":"2016-03-28T21:58:01","slug":"academic-family-tree-latex-and-tikz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.piglets.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/28\/academic-family-tree-latex-and-tikz\/","title":{"rendered":"Academic Family Tree, LaTeX and Tikz"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few years ago<\/a>, I found out some information on my academic genealogy, going through my supervisor, Brian McMaster, back through others to G.H. Hardy<\/a>, Newton<\/a> and Galileo<\/a> and a little further before the records run dry. Of course it is nice that mathematics is an old and well established discipline with great records<\/a>. And also, the number of scholars back then was much lower, so it's not surprising that famous names turn up quite quickly, if you just have the full records - just as on a less cerebral level - the clich\u00c3\u00a9 goes that Charlemagne got about quite a bit<\/a>. A bit of work with my mathematical colleagues all show such interesting family trees.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I slowly built an SVG file in Inkscape<\/a> to reflect this family tree, but it was slow and rather a pain to maintain. So I've long wondered if it can be done better in LaTeX,<\/a> with the Tikz<\/a> graphics packages. Tikz is awesome, and while it has quite a learning curve as for LaTeX itself, I used it extensively in producing the slides for my recent inaugural lecture<\/a>. This meant mixing the formulae with the graphics was pretty effortless. This is a slightly different problem.<\/p>\n

A quick scan, showed that Tikz can be used to build flowcharts rather easily<\/a>. So I began in this way, building nodes of people and then positioning them relative to each other. A bit tedious but much more pleasing that doing it in a vector graphics program, for me anyway. I rapidly ran into problems in building very large page styles. In particular odd things happened when I tried to include graphics (the image became the whole page, regardless of scaling).<\/p>\n

I experimented briefly with the tikzposter<\/a> package, but couldn't really get anywhere with it - perhaps because I hadn't started from the ground up with it. I think I looked at beamerposter<\/a> but again ran into problems, possibly because I didn't start that way. In the end it was the simple a0poster<\/a> package that did it for me, anyway - although I had to force the font throughout to be \"\\tiny\".<\/p>\n

I also discovered the hard way that the wrapfig <\/a>package doesn't seem to work within a Tikz node, so I've messily improvised by adding another node for the images of people and relating its position to the relevant biographical section.<\/p>\n

I harvested some basic biographical information from Wikipedia<\/a> and one other website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I managed to get something basic working. The image is big so the version below is blurry. A link to the smaller PDF<\/a> and the LaTeX source on GitHub<\/a> are shown below.<\/p>\n

\"PDF<\/a>\"LaTeX<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Family<\/a>

The actual document is very large in terms of page size, so click on the PDF for that clearer (smaller) version, this image is just to show indicative layout.<\/p><\/div>\n

FamilyTree<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few years ago, I found out some information on my academic genealogy, going through my supervisor, Brian McMaster, back through others to G.H. Hardy, Newton and Galileo and a little further before the records run dry. Of course it is nice that mathematics is an old and well established discipline with great records. And […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"vkexunit_cta_each_option":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[158,66,31,157,119,156],"class_list":["post-492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-12-stem","tag-genealogy","tag-latex","tag-mathematics","tag-poster","tag-12-stem","tag-tikz"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p52I4w-7W","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piglets.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piglets.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piglets.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglets.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglets.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=492"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglets.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":498,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglets.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492\/revisions\/498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piglets.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglets.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglets.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}