Saturday, February 27. 2010
Generate random number in LaTeX
Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum
It is possible to generate random numbers in a TeX document. For a gimmick i wanted a random line from a text file in my slides. The first step was to find a random number.
A random number generator is provided by the package "lcg". The generator can be initialized with a given positive value. The same positive seed results in the same random numbers. A seed of -1 initializes the generator with a more or less random value, based on the current time.
\usepackage{lcg}
\newcounter{SavedRandom}
\newcommand{\NewRandom}
\newcommand{\GenerateRandumNumber}[2]
{
\setcounter{SavedRandom}{0}
\reinitrand[first=1, last=#1, counter=FileRandom, seed=-1, quiet=y]
\rand
\setcounter{SavedRandom}{\value{FileRandom}}
\renewcommand{#2}{\arabic{SavedRandom}}
}
\begin{document}
\GenerateRandumNumber{15}{\NewRandom}
Random number: \NewRandom
\end{document}
In addition it needs a counter to store the random value ("SavedRandom" in my example) and a command to to "export" the random number ("NewRandom" in the example) into the text.
The function which actually initializes the random generator accepts two parameters: the highest possible random number (the min value is set to 1 in my example) and the command to store the generated random number ("NewRandom"). The number is exported as arabian number, it's also possible to use roman numerals:
or alphabetic characters:
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Probably a rare needed feature, but i had to count the number lines in a text file - in LaTeX.Counting the line numbers is done by using a counter (what else, eh?) and readling the file line by line: \documentclass{book}\usepackage{ifthen}\newcounter{Fi Comment (1)
Tracked: Feb 28, 22:32