\jeff{krimmel}

A Dashed Circle and Grid in LaTeX

I have only very recently begun to play with the graphics production capabilities of LaTeX. The most common means of producing graphics in LaTeX is the picture environment. It turns out the default picture environment is quite limited, and I needed to use the epic package to achieve the desired effect. I wanted to produce a grid of nine cells by nine cells, with a dashed circle in the middle. I was able to produce the following

with the source code found in this tex file. I have also put the source code in HTML format.

If you looked at the source code, you may have noticed that I had to cheat to get a circle. I could not find a way to get a dashed circle of an arbitrary radius. I can get circles with a solid line, and I can get filled circles (called disks, in the parlance of the package documentation). But I simply could find no easy way to get a dashed circle. So, I busted out the ole spreadsheet and calculated a few points on the circumference of my circle and connected those points with dashed lines. It seems to have worked well enough for my purpose. But there has to be a better way to do this.

Here is a link to a page with links to both the epic and eepic manuals, amongst other informative bits. Those were quite helpful in my search for a solution to this particular problem.