Chapter 1
Getting Started

TeXProject is a (La)TeX tool for managing project manuals. TeXProject offers:

• a declarative description language for your projects in terms of subprojects, tasks and milestones;
• a programmable formatted output of project components such as dates, manpower, descriptions or dependencies;
• an extendible graphical output of pert, schedule, tree and effort charts for visualizing the project data.

The advantage of TeXProject over other products is its integration within the (La)TeX environment: you can cross reference your project’s items in your document and customize your graphics. Advanced users can create their own functions and their own graphics, or extend the existing ones by using the advanced primitives of TeXProject and the primitives of (Al)DraTeX. (Commands with uppercase characters belong to (Al)DraTeX. Commands for drawing environments use parentheses, instead of braces, to delimit their arguments.)

DraTeX is a low-level system that includes commands for drawing primitive shapes like lines, ovals, curves and text as well as commands for combining such entities into sophisticated structures. AlDraTeX is an extension of DraTeX into a high-level system for specifying common entities like charts and diagrams. These systems are described in ‘TeX and LaTeX: Drawing and Literate Programming’ Gurari, E., McGraw-Hill, 1994.

To produce a management report with TeX or LaTeX using TeXProject, you need to include the TeXProject.sty file in your document. TeXProject.sty requires the graphic libraries DraTex.sty and AlDraTex.sty. They are automatically loaded when loading TeXProject:

 \input TeXProject.sty