siu­nitx - A com­pre­hen­sive (SI) units pack­age

Phys­i­cal quan­ti­ties have both num­bers and units, and each phys­i­cal quan­tity should be ex­pressed as the prod­uct of a num­ber and a unit. Type­set­ting phys­i­cal quan­ti­ties re­quires care to en­sure that the com­bined math­e­mat­i­cal mean­ing of the num­ber-unit com­bi­na­tion is clear. In par­tic­u­lar, the SI units sys­tem lays down a con­sis­tent set of units with rules on how these are to be used. How­ever, dif­fer­ent coun­tries and pub­lish­ers have dif­fer­ing con­ven­tions on the ex­act ap­pear­ance of num­bers (and units). The siunitx pack­age pro­vides a set of tools for au­thors to type­set quan­ti­ties in a con­sis­tent way. The pack­age has an ex­tended set of con­fig­u­ra­tion op­tions which make it pos­si­ble to fol­low vary­ing ty­po­graphic con­ven­tions with the same in­put syn­tax. The pack­age in­cludes au­to­mated pro­cess­ing of num­bers and units, and the abil­ity to con­trol tab­u­lar align­ment of num­bers.

In­stal­la­tion

The pack­age is sup­plied in dtx for­mat and as a pre-ex­tracted zip file, siunitx.tds.zip. The later is most con­ve­nient for most users: sim­ply un­zip this in your lo­cal texmf di­rec­tory . If you want to un­pack the .dtx your­self, run­ning texsiu­nitx.dtx will extract the package whereas la­tex siu­nitx.dtx will extract it and also typeset the documentation. The pack­age re­quires LaTeX3 sup­port as pro­vided in the l3kernel and l3packages bun­dles. Both of these are avail­able on CTAN as ready-to-in­stall zip files. Suitable ver­sions are avail­able in MiKTeX 2.9 and TeX Live 2015 (up­dat­ing the rel­e­vant pack­ages on­line may be nec­es­sary). LaTeX3, and so siunitx, re­quires the ε-TeX ex­ten­sions: these are avail­able on all mod­ern TeX sys­tems.

Type­set­ting the doc­u­men­ta­tion re­quires a num­ber of pack­ages in ad­di­tion to those needed to use the pack­age. This is mainly be­cause of the num­ber of demon­stra­tion items in­cluded in the text. To com­pile the doc­u­men­ta­tion with­out er­ror, you will need the pack­ages:

• amsmath
• booktabs
• cancel
• caption
• cleveref
• colortbl
• csquotes
• datatool
• helvet
• mathpazo
• multirow
• listings
• pgfplots
• xcolor