Any online available depiction(s) of LaTeX packages hierarchy?

Question

Here often we see statements You don't need to load PGF because TikZ loads it, or don't load TikZ because PGFplots already does that.... I wonder if:

Is there a tree diagram listing all these relationships/subordinations/rank between packages?

Given the number of packages out there, you're asking for a very messy graph :) — jub0bs, Jun 29 '14 at 00:02
As far as I understand, it doesn't matter that you call a package that has already been called by someone else before. It just gets ignored when it is requested. I think you can see what packages you are using with \listfiles — Mario S. E., Jun 29 '14 at 02:48
@MarioS.E. : it was good to know the redundancy is harmless - by the tone of the comments I referred to I was under the impression that this was not the case. I was afraid it would re-load packages again. This info makes the question moot. — Sergio Parreiras, Jun 29 '14 at 03:16
@SergioParreiras Nah, don't worry about re-loading. fica tranquilo, pá :) — Mario S. E., Jun 29 '14 at 03:56
@MarioS.E. You can get errors if you have different optional arguments in the two cases: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=optclash — Torbjørn T., Jun 29 '14 at 08:29
@TorbjørnT. yes, you're right. Thanks for pointing that out — Mario S. E., Jun 29 '14 at 10:27
Have a look at this answer by @Heiko: How to design a command inquiring internally required packages? — Johannes_B, Oct 20 '14 at 15:33

Joseph Wright · Answer 1 · 2015-12-20T13:50:57.910

You can use \listfiles to see what packages are actually loaded and can look through the log to see what loads what: TeX surrounds each file with a parenthesis pair [( ... )] so one can parse the log and work out dependencies. However, I would strongly suggest not doing this. In any document, you should know which packages provide which commands you use, and explicitly load those packages. It's a very bad idea to rely on package X always loading package Y (beyond a few places where the dependency is in a bundle of related packages, and there almost always the 'low level' one should not be used directly by users).

Any online available depiction(s) of LaTeX packages hierarchy?

1 Answers1