MetaPost + TeX rendition of Oliver Byrne's "The first six books of the Elements of Euclid"

This project is not intended to create the exact copy of the original, but rather is an attempt to implement all its most important features in a way that would allow easy modification and creation of similarly styled geometric proofs.

At the moment, all the code for this purpose exists as a standalone LaTeX package, is on CTAN,and can be used by employing \usepackage{byrne}.

Beyond merely reproducing Byrne's original design elements, this version features some improvments over the original. E.g., it has a mechanism to add small letters to Byrne's colorful diagrams, as suggested by Edward Tufte in Envisioning Information. This feature is turned on by default in the Russian version and can be turned on with one line in the English version (save for some layout changes which arise due to letter designations taking more space).

This edition features generated initials and vignettes, so there are no two identical initials in the whole book. This feature is pretty much work-in-progress, and, when ready (i.e. when it starts producing satisfactory results), is likely to become a part of fiziko library.

The book itself (byrne-en-latex.tex) and its Russian translation (byrne-ru-latex.tex) are licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

MetaPost library (byrne.mp) and initials generator (lettrines.mp) are licensed under GPLv3 or later.

To build the book run lualatex byrne-en-latex.tex or lualatex byrne-ru-latex.tex within the book directory. To generate the initials run mpost lettrines.mp within \lettrines directory.

See releases for prepared .pdfs (at the moment it's an older ConTeXt version). See Actions for fresher pdfs (unless they are expired).