Besides writing math, sometimes it's useful to actually calculate something.
We have several options:
The
calc
package offers basic math with LaTeX, with lengths and countersThe
fp
package provides fixed point arithmetic with high precisionThe
pgfmath
package belongs to the PGF/TikZ package and provides many functions and a good parserLuaLaTeX is a version of LaTeX which allows programming calculation in the programming language Lua
Here, let's work with the pgfmath
package, as we already worked with TikZ, and it's better documented than the other options.
Follow these steps:
Start a document, load the
tikz
package, and begin your document without indentation at the beginning:\documentclass{article} \usepackage{tikz} \begin{document} \noindent
In your text, use the
\pgfmathparse
command for calculating and the\pgfmathresult
command for printing:In a right-angled triangle the two shortest sides got widths of 3 and 7, respectively. The longest side has a width...