I'm investigating if it is possible to generate electrical schematics for industrial machinery with the LaTeX ecosystem. They are quite different from electronic circuits because are developed sequentially. Here is a typical page drawn with QElectrotech (the only open source package I found for such purpose):
These are my requirements:
- the schematic can span several pages (let's say up to 50);
- adding new symbols must be easy;
- should be introspectable (if possible) to leave the doors opened for addition of generated contents (wire numbering, cross reference, terminals and a lot of stuff can be automatically generated);
- the result must be easy to be embedded in a LaTeX document.
I checked some existent solution but I'd like to have advices from more seasoned people:
- METAPOST
It is a pleasure to use and MakeCirc yet provides a base, but I fear scalability issues and I don't like the way dynamic text is handled. - Circuitikz
Seems to be the quickest way to get started but I'm scared of TeX language and I don't have any idea on how introspection can be implemented. - The circuits library of TikZ PGF
I found no documentation and from what I understood it provides no benefit to circuitikz other than being a core library. - pst-circ
For this use case, I don't see any advantage over circuitikz. - Circuit macros
Not tested: I'd prefer to avoid having to learn two new languages (m4 and pic) if there are no clear advantages.
Also, this application seems to be a good candidate for LuaTEX, but I lack a general overview of the interaction between the components, hence I don't know if it is better (or even possible) have LaTeX embedding Lua code that generates circuitikz macros or a Lua program that calls METAPOST for symbols and TeX for labels or Lua embedded into circuitikz in some way to provide introspection.
