PPPIC

PPPIC, is my, Peter’s, Python / PSTricks PIC, a purely Python implementation based on DPIC, written by Emeritus Prof. Dwight Applevich, i.e. Dwight’s PIC, which in turn is based on the original PIC compiler, written by Brian Kernighan, now only available as gpic, or GNU PIC.

On the first page of the PIC User Manual, the following example shows the workflow of PIC in the PIC drawing language:

.PS
ellipse "document"
arrow
box "PIC"
arrow
box "TBL/EQN" "(optional)" dashed
arrow
box "TROFF"
arrow
ellipse "typesetter"
.PE

or graphically “dePICted” as,

with TROFF being a “Text Processor for Typesetters” in the Unix environment.

DPIC was developed to produce, among others, “$\LaTeX$-compatible code”, to quote from the DPIC user manual. The dpic -p option produces output for postprocessing by the $\LaTeX$ package PSTricks, whilst the dpic -g option produces output for the PGF/TikZ packages in$\LaTeX$. This gave a alternative to the GNU PIC’s gpic -t tpic output. The different alternatives to leaverage \LaTeX together with the M4 Circuit Macros and the PIC language, is graphically shown below,

When I originally started using Circuit Macros, PGF/TikZ was not yet an option, and I settled on using the PSTricks option. With PSTricks it is very easy to change line colours, e.g. \psset{linecolor=red}, make custom fills, e.g. \pscustom[fillstyle=vlines, linecolor=black, fillcolor=lightgray] and produce rotated text, e.g. \rput{90}{this text will be rotatad by 90$^\circ$}, etc.

As it was impossible for me to get approval from our IT department to install dpic on my laptop, I used Claude to design a lightweight PIC processor in Python to only produce PSTricks output, and basically be equivalent to calling dpic -p, which I called, pppic. Analogue to the ‘D’ in DPICstanding for ‘Dwight’, the ‘P&P’ in P&P-PIC/pppic stands for ‘Python/PSTricks.

For pppic the simplistic workflow (or rather the only workflow) looks like this:

But instead of using TROFF, P&P-PIC/pppic will produce output to be used with $\LaTeX$.

Each PIC picture, 1… n will the be an /input into the main LaTeX document,

However, while