TikZiT

TikZiT is a graphical tool for rapidly creating graphs and string diagrams using PGF/TikZ. It was used, for example, to make all of the 2500+ diagrams in this book.

Building on Windows

TiKZiT can be built in Windows using Qt Creator (part of Qt for Windows) or from the command line. In either case, it is recommended you compile with mingw32, which is included in the official Qt distribution. There is no reason, in principle, that you couldn't use mingw64 or MSVC, but these haven't been tested.

In addition to Qt itself, TikZiT needs flex/bison, Poppler (with Qt bindings), and OpenSSL. For flex/bison, the simplest way to install this is to download WinFlexBison, then make sure both are in your %Path% so the build tools can find them. Alternatively, you can install it via Chocolatey, via:

> choco install winflexbison

For convenience, I have packaged up some headers and pre-built DLLs to take care of the Poppler and OpenSSL dependencies in a single shot. If you wish to use these, download win32-deps.zip and extract it into the source folder before building. At this point, you should be able to open tikzit.pro in Qt Creator and build the project. If you wish to build from the command line, make sure mingw32-make.exe is in your %Path%. For the version that comes with Qt, this is in C:\Qt\Tools\mingw530_32\bin. Then, from the command prompt, run:

> C:\Qt\5.XX.X\mingw53_32\bin\qtenv2.bat
> cd \path\to\tikzit
> qmake -r
> mingw32-make

To get a portable directory, you can then (optionally) run:

> deploy-win.bat

Building on Linux

This should be buildable in Linux using a "standard" dev setup (gcc, flex, bison, make) as well as Qt. It has been most recently tested with Qt 6.2. First Install Qt and add the $QTDIR/bin to your PATH. The other dependencies should be available via your package manager, e.g. on Ubuntu 22.04 run:

sudo apt install flex bison libpoppler-dev libpoppler-cpp-dev libgl1-mesa-dev

After that, building is:

qmake -r
make

To get a portable directory, you can then (optionally) run:

./deploy-linux.sh

Building on other distributions should be similar. For Qt setup, you can find instructions for openSUSE and Arch Linux on the Qt wiki.

Building on MacOS

You'll need developer tools, Qt5, and Poppler (with Qt bindings) installed. You can install these via Homebrew with the following commands:

brew install qt5
brew install poppler --with-qt

This doesn't add Qt binaries to the $PATH by default, so you may wish to either run:

brew link --force qt5

or add /usr/local/opt/qt/bin to your $PATH. Once this is done, TikZiT can be built from the command line via:

qmake -r
make

To bundle the required libraries into tikzit.app and create a .dmg file, you can additionally run:

./deploy-osx.sh

On older systems (pre-10.11), you can build with Qt 5.6, which claims to support Mac OS as far back as Mountain Lion. It is installable via MacPorts:

sudo port -N -k install qt56
export PATH=/opt/local/libexec/qt5/bin:$PATH

I have only tested this with TikZiT 2.0, so to install Poppler (required by TikZiT >= 2.1), you are on your own.