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XFIG - Facility for Interactive Generation of figures under X11
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Xfig is a menu-driven tool that allows the user to draw and manipulate objects
interactively in an X window. The resulting pictures can be saved, printed
on postscript printers or converted to a variety of other formats (e.g. to
allow inclusion in LaTeX documents).
This file contains some notes about installing xfig. The directory
'Libraries/Examples' contains some example figures and the 'doc' directory
contains documentation including the manual in troff-man format and html.
You also need to get the fig2dev package which contains fig2dev, the
postprocessor that converts Fig files to various output formats such as
PostScript (and EPS), PNG, GIF, LaTeX, etc.
Xfig and the fig2dev package are available from:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/mcj
Xfig expects fig2dev to be in the command search path. Otherwise, you
may set the FIG2DEV_DIR environment variable if you want to force
it to look elsewhere.
The xfig distribution includes a library of Fig objects, which are available
via the library object drawing mode.
Included are libraries such as electrical parts, logic symbols, music symbols,
computer clip art, flow charting symbols, network symbols, and some buildings.
It is hoped that users will contribute to and enhance these libraries for the
benefit of the xfig user community.
Send bug reports to thomas.loimer@tuwien.ac.at.
NOTE: For exporting Fig files to any of the bitmap formats (e.g. PNG, JPEG)
you will need to get a version of ghostscript that has jpeg, pcx256,
pbmraw, ppmraw and tiff24nc drivers.
If your ghostscript is not called "gs" then change the X resource
"Fig.ghostscript" in Fig.ad to the correct name before installing xfig.
fig2dev uses ghostscript for exporting and xfig uses it for importing
PS and EPS files.
The sources of xfig are released in a tarball. Alternatively, the development
version can be downloaded from sourceforge. To compile from the sources released
in a tarball, unpack the file, change into the top directory, and issue the
commands
./configure --with-appdefaultdir=/usr/share/X11/app-defaults
make
make install
The option "--with-appdefaultdir" sets the path where the app-defaults file for
X11 will be installed. The exact location depends on your distribution. It is
the X-server which needs to find this file in its search path. The X-server sets
the resources given in the app-defaults file, and passes the values of these
resources to xfig. Other options set the directories where the icon for xfig or
the xfig.desktop file should be installed to. See also the file "INSTALL".
In the development sources, first call
autoreconf -i
then continue with the three commands above.
From Brian V. Smith:
There are two app-defaults files for colors: one I call the "classic"
color scheme (blues for the buttons and primary colors for OK/CANCEL
buttons) and a new one provided by Joel D. Young (jdyoung@afit.af.mil)
which looks more like tcl, and I think is a little nicer. It looks
best when used with Xaw3d.1.0, which can show 3d relief for labels,
not just buttons. This new color set is the default.
If you want the "classic" colors, copy Fig-color.classic.ad to your
app-defaults directory as "Fig-color".
If you can't install xfig in your system directories you may put it
anywhere in your search path. The app-defaults files (Fig.ad and
Fig-color.ad) may be put into any directory as Fig and Fig-color
respectively, and pointed to by setting the shell environment
variable XAPPLRESDIR. You may also put the CompKeyDB file in that
directory and compile xfig with --with-compkeydbdir=<path> pointing
there.
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General NOTES:
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The pattern shading (e.g. bricks, shingles, etc.) only work for PostScript, PDF,
tikz, tk (of the tcl/tk fame), and the bitmap output formats (e.g. PNG, GIF,
JPEG, etc.).
Unless you have an image (picture object) in your figure, you may not gain
very much by exporting in JPEG over PNG because of the nature of compression
used in both methods. PNG is usually better for line drawings or drawings
with large blocks of continuous color (e.g. filled polygons). JPEG is usually
better for compressing (photograpic) images.
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