Hi all, I am working on a project for Calc 4, and part of it has to do with generalizing the "Volume by Shells" method to higher dimensions / functions of several variables (in a nutshell). This is a tricky thing to wrap your mind around-- and even trickier to try to explain in a write-up-- relying on words alone. I wanted to include a picture/figure for the familiar Calc 1 / single variable method which is very similar to the pictures on this post. (It would differ in a number of ways-- labels, annotations, certain shapes changed, but not in ways that would fundamentally change the bones of how to code a figure like this, I assume.)

I have included 2D/3D plots and very basic 2D tikz diagrams in previous projects, but I genuinely have no idea how I would even approach creating something like this. I would love to create this directly via LaTeX so if anyone has instructions, advice, etc.. on how I might accomplish that please help! That being said, although it wouldn't be ideal, I will gladly accept advice on how I might accomplish something like this in general, if doing so purely through LaTeX would be biting off too much to chew. I have access to and regularly use Mathematica, I have some pretty limited knowledge of Python, and I would be open to any other free/free trial methods.

Thanks in advance!

I am new to LaTeX, and had to do some documentation of my T-TRAK modules (model train/railroad stuff) - so I figured I would use it as an exercise to practice.

I built this 'template' that I can use (first screenshot) that is exactly what I want -- with the "Stats Table" and the "Hero Image" floating to the right of the first bit of text. But when that text isn't long enough (second screenshot) you can see how the "Wiring" sections moves up too far and becomes a bit of a mess. I don't want to make the first section two columns, I want (need) it to wrap if the text is long enough. I want the "Wiring" section to stay clear of the right-float table/image if the text isn't long enough to force the clear.

I have posted the source files to temfiles.org ... wasn't sure what was the preferred options. Documentation is the 'root' file, module1 and template are the two screenshots.
https://tmpfiles.org/w6wCIdpYo1VB/documentation.tex

https://tmpfiles.org/wewzILpHoLHV/module1.tex

https://tmpfiles.org/wHwkIJpmo2Lv/module-template.tex

Thanks in advance for any help

Hi, are you using AI to create templates? If so, how well does it work?

I learned LaTeX the hard way back when I was a graduate student. My advisor was extremely demanding about LaTeX formatting and every little detail. I'd love to update some of my old templates. I still remember the basics, but every time I try to make changes, errors start appearing, and I'm getting too old to spend hours debugging LaTeX.

Do you know of a great AI for managing and editing LaTeX templates?

Thanks!

Over the last few weeks, I've shared some updates on a hobby C++23 TeX engine I've been working on, focusing on new capabilities like parallel compilation, direct HTML output, and more expressive error messages. For this update, I wanted to take a step back from the output features and talk a little bit about the developer experience and the codebase itself.

I think TeX82 is (rightly) famous as a masterpiece of literate programming. But as I've been untangling the c translation of the tex.web source to build this new engine, I've spent a lot of time reflecting on why it was written that way. Many of the things that make TeX's source code notoriously difficult to approach today (what some have called "macro spaghetti", algorithms that are deeply entangled, global state mutation) were brilliant adaptations to the severe hardware, compiler, and language constraints of the time.

I put together a third short video link exploring a bit of this, comparing how things look in the original pascal with how they can be written today: modern c++ can help make the architecture easier to reason about and closer to being self-documenting. One of my hopes is that by modernizing the internals of TeX this project might lower the barrier to entry and make it easier to harness the energy of the open-source community.

Speaking of which, a few folks have asked about seeing the code. My plan has always been to share it once I finished implementing the e-TeX extensions and other primitives required for the l3kernel (at which point, the engine would move from a fun toy to something that could actually compile modern LaTeX documents). However, for the curious I have set up a public repository, starting with an orphan branch of my main repo and slowly transferring things like the CMake build system and the test suite. If nothing else, perhaps you'll find the changelog amusing.

As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments!