dental-palmer

A LaTeX package for representing Zsigmondy-Palmer dental notation using TikZ. This package allows dental professionals, educators, researchers, and publishing specialists to efficiently typeset typographically consistent and visually balanced dental notation in academic and clinical documents.

The CTAN distribution is named dental-palmer, while the LaTeX package is provided as palmer.sty and is loaded with:

\usepackage{palmer}

Basic Usage

\Palmer[<options>]{<UL>}{<UR>}{<LR>}{<LL>}{<upper midline>}{<lower midline>}

Where:

• [options]: Optional comma-separated list of key–value settings (see Options)
• <UL>: Upper left quadrant
• <UR>: Upper right quadrant
• <LR>: Lower right quadrant
• <LL>: Lower left quadrant
• <upper midline>: Symbol for upper midline position
• <lower midline>: Symbol for lower midline position

Note that “left” and “right” here refer to the notation’s visual representation, not the anatomical left and right of the jaw.

For the upper-left and lower-left quadrants, characters are entered from mesial to distal (natural reading order) and are automatically reversed for display, following standard dental charting conventions. An error is raised if all four quadrant arguments are empty.

Options

The optional first argument accepts a comma-separated list of the following keys:

• align=base|center|bottom: Vertical alignment of the notation within a line of text (default: base; centre is accepted as a synonym for center).
• gap-ratio=<number>: A value in the range [0, 1] that uniformly scales the white space around the notation. The default of 1 gives the maximum spacing, and 0 gives the tightest. Out-of-range values are clamped, with a warning.
• no-vert: Suppresses the vertical (midline) bar. Useful for representing a single jaw without distinguishing left from right. When active, the midline arguments are ignored.
• no-reverse: Displays the upper-left and lower-left quadrants in the input order instead of reversing them (affects only the UL and LL quadrants).

Several keys may be combined, for example:

\Palmer[align=center, gap-ratio=0.5]{12}{12}{12}{12}{}{}

The Boolean options no-vert and no-reverse may be written on their own as shorthand for no-vert=true and no-reverse=true.

Document-wide defaults

\palmerset applies one or more of the options above to every subsequent \Palmer call, so common defaults need not be repeated. Options given in an individual call override these defaults for that call only.

\palmerset{align=center, gap-ratio=0.5}
\Palmer{1}{1}{1}{1}{}{}                 % uses the defaults above
\Palmer[gap-ratio=1]{2}{2}{2}{2}{}{}    % overrides gap-ratio for this call

Because \palmerset follows TeX's grouping rules, call it in the preamble (after \usepackage{palmer}) or at the start of the document to set defaults for the whole document.

Changes in Version 2

Version 2 introduces a key–value interface for the optional argument. When upgrading from version 1, note:

• The optional argument is now a key–value list. Use align=center (and align=base, align=bottom) instead of the bare center / base / bottom of earlier releases.
• The vertical bar is suppressed with the no-vert option. The old novert keyword placed in the sixth or seventh (midline) argument is no longer recognized.
• New gap-ratio option for uniformly tightening the white space around the notation.
• New no-reverse option for disabling the automatic reversal of the left quadrants.
• New \palmerset command for setting options for a whole document.

For detailed documentation and more examples, please refer to the dental-palmer-doc.pdf file included in this repository.

License

Copyright 2025-2026 Yosuke Yamazaki

Released under the LaTeX Project Public License 1.3 or later

Support This Research

This dental notation typesetting LaTeX macro was developed by Dr. Yamazaki at Nihon University School of Dentistry as part of ongoing research in oral health and dental informatics.

This software is freely available for all uses, including commercial applications. If you find it valuable for your work or publishing, please consider supporting our continued research.

Acknowledgement

This work was conducted with the support of JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP25K15395.