Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!batcomputer!cornell!beck
From: beck@CS.Cornell.EDU (Micah Beck)
Subject: Re: drawings + TeX
Message-ID: <1991Jun17.130836.7646@cs.cornell.edu>
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Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY 14853
References: <1991Jun17.080736.29815@uni-paderborn.de>
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1991 13:08:36 GMT
Lines: 44

karsten@uni-paderborn.de (Karsten Brinkmann) writes:

>The problem is, that my professor wants several drawings
>(final automata, turing maschines, etc) to be included. For I have 
>acces to a postscript-printer, I used 'idraw' (available on 
                                        ^^^^^
					bad choice!

>a SUN workstation, running X) to draw postscript-graphics and
>the TeX macro package 'psfig' to include them.

IDraw is a very nice tool if you have access to a PS printer.  However,
its output is not portable in the sense you would like.

>So long, so good! Now I want to take the whole stuff and to print
>it on a non-PS-Printer (HP Deskjet). 
>So what I'm looking for is a kind of PicTeX (available for plain-TeX)
>to transform a drawing file directly into a file containing 
>TeX drawing commands. The result should be, that the resulting
>DVI-file could be printed out on almost every printer!

PiCTeX macros are available for plain-TeX; that's no problem.  The problem is
in transforming an IDraw drawing file to PiCTeX.  As far as I know there is no
such translation tool.

The solution: Use XFig and TransFig (fig2dev) instead!  TransFig was
created specifically for this purpose: to turn the Fig drawing file format
into a portable figure description language for TeX.  You can read about
TransFig in TUGboat Vol. 11 No.2, "TransFig: Portable Figures for TeX."
TransFig translates Fig darwings into many different formats, compatible
with different operating environments.  You may find that PiCTeX is not the
best for you; if you have a driver that supports tpic specials, then I 
recommend using Conrad Kwok's EEPIC macros.

However, the drawings you've created will probably have to be redrawn using
XFig.  An IDraw-to-Fig translation would be very nice to have, but as far
as I know does not exist.

XFig is part of the contributed software distributed with X.  TransFig
is available for anonymous FTP from directory ftp.cs.cornell.edu:pub/transfig,
or my mail from archive-server@sun.soe.clarkson.edu.

Micah Beck
Cornell CS