Handcalcs

Introduction

This is the documentation for Handcalcs.jl. This package supplies macros to generate $\LaTeX$ formatted strings from mathmatical formulas. This package takes inspiration from handcalcs.py which is a python package that works best in jupyter notebooks. The goal is to get the functionalities of that package and bring them to Julia. At this point, I believe most (if not all) of the features from the python package are here. This package is an extension of Latexify.jl. The @latexdefine macro is similar to the main @handcalcs macro, but instead of only a symbolic rendering it also renders the numeric substitution.

The package can be used with Unitful.jl and can also be used with Quarto to produce high quality calculations. See the Flexural Design Example for an example.

Installation

This package is registered in the Julia registry, so to install it you can just run:

Pkg.add("Handcalcs")

Basic example:

Single line expression

using Handcalcs
a = 3
b = 4
@handcalcs c = sqrt(a^2 + b^2)

\[\begin{aligned} c &= \sqrt{a^{2} + b^{2}} = \sqrt{3^{2} + 4^{2}} = 5.0 \end{aligned}\]

Future Plans

There are a number of things that I would like to implement to the package. Here is a list of features I hope to add:

• Maybe a symbolic mode that would essentially be like @latexdefine but you get function unrolling and multiline support.
• I have also thought about adding a setting that you could change if you were within the REPL and instead of latex (since it is not very readable) to instead output a simple string instead. For example: I_x = b*h^3/12 = 5*15^3/12 = 1406.25.