Chris Hanretty » latex

Drawing veto players diagrams

Chris — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 07:35:49 +0000

For a long time I’ve not known how to produce, with minimum fuss, diagrams of veto players in political space, even in one dimension.

I’ve now bothered to learn some PGF syntax, for use within latex. Here’s come code, mostly stolen from an example by Till Tantau which will draw a nice example of instability in a two-dimensional three-member legislature. Image first, code after the break:

\documentclass[a4paper]{article} \usepackage[english]{babel} \usepackage[dvipsnames]{xcolor} % [dvipsnames] \usepackage{tikz} \usetikzlibrary{calc,patterns}


\begin{document}

\maketitle

% START DOCUMENT HERE
\begin{tikzpicture}[scale=1]
%% First define our ideal points

\coordinate[label=above:$A$] (A) at (-2,2);

\coordinate[label=above:$B$]  (B) at (2,0);

\coordinate[label=above:$C$] (C) at (-1,-2);
% middles of sides

\coordinate (A') at ($(B)!.5!(C)$); %%

\coordinate (B') at ($(A)!.5!(C)$); %%

\coordinate (C') at ($(B)!.5!(A)$); %%
\coordinate[label=0:$SQ$] (SQ) at (intersection of A--A' and B--B');
%% Now define circles with radius between the ideal point and the status quo position
\def\firstcircle{(A) let

\p1 = ($ (SQ) - (A) $)

in circle ({veclen(\x1,\y1)})}
\def\secondcircle{(B) let

\p1 = ($ (SQ) - (B) $)

in circle ({veclen(\x1,\y1)})}
\def\thirdcircle{(C) let

\p1 = ($ (SQ) - (C) $)

in circle ({veclen(\x1,\y1)})}
%% And draw them;

\filldraw [yellow, opacity=0.4] \firstcircle;

\filldraw [cyan, opacity=0.4] \secondcircle;

\filldraw [magenta, opacity=0.4] \thirdcircle;
%% Label the ideal points

\filldraw [gray] (A) circle (1pt);

\filldraw [gray] (B) circle (1pt);

\filldraw [gray] (C) circle (1pt);
%% We now draw grid lines which are centred upon the status quo position

\draw [help lines,step=1cm] let

\p1 = ($ (SQ) - (0,0) $)

in

[xshift={\x1}](-4,-4) grid (4,4);
%% Now draw axis lines
\draw let \p1

\p1 = ($ (SQ) - (0,0) $)

in

[<->](-4,\y1) -- (4,\y1) node[below=6pt,left=0pt]{Guns}

[<->](\x1,-4) -- (\x1,4) node[below=20pt,right=6pt,rotate=90]{Butter};
%% Now mark out the winset of the SQ by cross-hatching

\begin{scope}

	\clip \firstcircle;

	\fill[pattern=crosshatch dots] \secondcircle;

\end{scope}
\begin{scope}

	\clip \secondcircle;

	\fill[pattern=crosshatch dots] \thirdcircle;

\end{scope}
\begin{scope}

	\clip \thirdcircle;

	\fill[pattern=crosshatch dots] \firstcircle;

\end{scope}
%% And draw a little legend
\filldraw [pattern=crosshatch dots] (4.5,3) rectangle (5.5,3.5) node[below=6pt,right=1pt]{Winset of SQ} ;

\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

Unfortunately, the driver I use for Beamer presentations in xelatex doesn’t seem to support cross-hatching, so I have to get quite ugly…

A pet peeve (pearls before swine edition)

Chris — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 15:08:51 +0000

There are a number of things which annoy me about academic publishing.

Matching my output to the requirements of the journal is the worst of them.

I spent a lot of time learning LaTeX in order to make my documents look good.

But now I find that journals require me to make changes to my document which, in almost every instance, damage the appearance and intelligibility of the document.

For example: for an article I’m preparing now, I must:

turn off hyphenation and full justification
turn off all formatting for section headings (all caps only for top-level section marks)
place awkward placeholders for images, of the type [INSERT FIGURE 1 HERE]

Some of these (the last in particular) I don’t even know how to do in LaTeX. Indeed, the last requirement is, for me, the most noxious: I imagine the reviewer would far rather have the figure close at hand in the text, rather than having to page-down to see the figure, and then page-up to get back to the argument.

What’s the rationale? Are these attempts to mitigate the potential damage which comes from over-fine control in MS Word?

(Note: for the rest of the changes, I used the following:

\usepackage[none]{hyphenat}
\usepackage{ragged2e}

\usepackage{sectsty}
\sectionfont{\mdseries\MakeUppercase} % All caps, middle weight
\subsectionfont{\mdseries} % middle weight

)

Stick a fork in me (I’m done)

Chris — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:30:45 +0000

I’ve just emailed the final version of my thesis to the department.

I’ve spent most of today listening to my robotic overlord (his name is Alan) read out chunks of my thesis in the vain hope that I would better spot typos or errors that way. The idea — far too good to be my own, and I think stolen from Nick Anstead — is better in theory than in practice.

The rest of the day has been spent battling for BibTeX style files, and finally making up my own. I never realized how many bibliographic choices one has until I had to sit through the custom-bib dialog. Editor names reversed or firstname lastname? Proceedings and Collections in quotes or not? Years in brackets? Unfortunately, no optimal solution is known to exist: congealed preferences (mine and publishers’) seem to dominate.

Oh, I must just say a couple of things: Wheats is teh awsumz, David was never quiet, my flatmates suffered, and Bianca might even make it to the defence.

That is all. Goodnight.