prerex, version 2014-04-22. Macros for prerequisite charts, with associated editor and viewer applications. This package consists of prerex.sty a LaTeX package for producing charts of course nodes linked by arrows representing pre- and co-requisites, prerex an interactive program for creating and editing chart descriptions, and vprerex ("visual prerex") a GUI and previewer for prerex. The implementation of prerex.sty is built on pgf, so that it may be used equally happily with latex or pdflatex; prerex is written in C and vprerex is written in C++ using the Qt-4 and poppler libraries. See chart.{pdf,svg} for a small example of a prerequisite chart and real-life examples at http://www.cs.queensu.ca/students/undergraduate/prerequisites/ Prerequisite charts are useful to students selecting courses and planning their programs, and to faculty and staff advising students and managing curriculum development. Conventional sources of course, program and timetable information are rarely in a user-friendly format. Faculty and staff advisors, being already fairly familiar with their courses and programs, often do not appreciate how inconvenient it is for students to access all the information they need to make course choices. The crucial tool in the prerex suite is "prerex.sty", a macro package that defines a "chart" environment and commands to specify construction of course boxes and directed arrows between them. prerex.sty depends on pgf (and add-on tikz), version 3.0 or higher multido relsize calc hyperref The use of pgf means that Postscript processing is not required. Either pdflatex or latex -> dvips [ -> ps2pdf ] or latex -> dvipdfmx or latex -> dvisvgm (with suitable driver options) will generate charts. Installation of prerex.sty: + copy prerex.sty to your-texmf-tree/tex/latex/misc + copy doc/prerex.{tex,pdf} to your-texmf-tree/doc/latex/misc + if necessary, refresh the TeX database (e.g., texhash) + copy doc/prerex.sty.7 to sub-directory man7 of a man directory on your MANPATH + test by doing man 7 prerex.sty pdflatex chart.tex See doc/prerex.pdf for detailed documentation. The prerex editor allows interactive editing of the chart environments of LaTeX source files. It supports add, remove, cut-and-paste, and edit operations on course boxes and arrows, and vertical or horizontal shifts of the whole diagram or selected sets of course boxes. When a course box is moved, the arrows into and out of it automatically follow. To install on most Unix-like platforms, including OS-X and Cygwin on Windows: tar zxvf prerex-6.5.2.tar.gz cd prerex-6.5.2 ./configure [--prefix=$HOME] make make install (as root if necessary) The prerex editor will also build on the MinGW platform on Windows if the readline package in the gnuwin32.sourceforge.net repository has been installed. The effects of editing operations may be observed in any PDF viewer that re-loads dynamically. The vprerex (visual prerex) application included in the prerex suite is a GUI and viewer for the prerex editor. It may be used just as a minimalist viewer of arbitrary PDF files but supports editing of charts generated using prerex.sty by allowing coordinates of course boxes, arrows, and background points to be conveyed back to the prerex editor command-line using the clipboard. See the INSTALL in the tarball for installation instructions. See the file doc/intro.pdf for an overview of the prerex system. prerex.sty, README, prerex.1, prerex.5, prerex.sty.7, prerex.tex and chart.tex may be modified and distributed according to the terms of the LaTeX Project Public License. The source files for prerex and vprerex may be modified and distributed according to the terms of the GNU General Public Licence (version 2).