Programming with PerlTEX

PerlTEX couples two well-known worlds—the Perl programming language and the LATEX typesetting system. The resulting system provides users with a way to augment LATEX macros with Perl code, thereby adding programming capabilities to LATEX that would otherwise be difficult to express. In this paper, we illus- trate the use of PerlTEX with a variety of examples and explain the associated Perl code. Although Perl may perhaps be best known for its string manipula- tion capabilities, we demonstrate how PerlTEX indirectly provides support for “programming” graphics through the use of additional packages such as TikZ.