The rigidnotation LaTeX package

This package provides LaTeX macros to easily and concisely typeset vectors and matrices in a flexible way such as to follow the RIGID notation convention. The package enables the user to define custom commands that can then be used in any math-mode environment to efficiently and rigorously typeset the notational elements commonly used in robotics research (and many other fields) for position vectors, rotation matrices, pose matrices, etc.

Documentation

This package is available on CTAN, and a PDF manual is accessible in this repository.

Installation

There are (at least) three ways you can use to install this package:

1. With MikTeX (easiest), if your system is using it
2. Integrate the package with TeX Live, if your system is using it
3. Simply copy rigidnotation.sty in your LaTeX project

To know if your system is relying on MikTeX or TeX Live for package installation, run

tex -version | head -n 1

and the output should be either something like

TeX 3.141592653 (TeX Live 2022/dev/Debian)

or something like

MiKTeX-TeX 4.5 (MiKTeX 23.10)

As a standalone file

The fastest way to get going is to download the rigidnotation.sty in the root of your LaTeX project. This will not install the package onto your system but will make it available for a specific project.

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PhilNad/rigidnotation-latex/refs/heads/main/rigidnotation.sty

With MikTeX

This package is distributed by the MikTeX repository and can be easily installed from a working MikTeX distribution:

> miktex packages install rigidnotation
Installing package rigidnotation...
> miktex packages info rigidnotation
id: rigidnotation
title: Typeset vectors and matrices following the RIGID notation
version: 1.0.0
isInstalled: true

With TeX Live

If you want to install the package manually on your local computer, you can follow the steps outlined below.

1. Run TEXMFHOME=`kpsewhich -var-value TEXMFHOME` to get the path to your TeX package home.
2. Use echo $TEXMFHOME to verify that the package home is defined.
3. Run mkdir -p $TEXHOME/tex/latex/rigidnotation/ to create a directory for this package.
4. Clone this repository on your machine and cd into it.
5. Run tex rigidnotation.ins to generate the rigidnotation.sty macro file.
6. Run cp rigidnotation.sty $TEXHOME/tex/latex/rigidnotation/ to install the package.
7. Run pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode rigidnotation.dtx to build the documentation.
8. Run texhash $TEXHOME to update the LaTeX package tree.

Requirements

This package depends on mathtools and xparse packages, both of which are widely used.

License

Copyright (C) 2024 Philippe Nadeau

This file may be distributed and/or modified under the conditions of the LaTeX Project Public License, either version 1.3c of this license or (at your option) any later version. The latest version of this license is in:

http://www.latex-project.org/lppl.txt

and version 1.3c or later is part of all distributions of LaTeX version 2008-05-04 or later.