aemil@homxb.UUCP (A.MILEWSKI) (09/12/88)
CGM<->PIC Summary(?) About a month ago I broadcasted a request for information on translating Common Graphics Metafile (cgm) format files to UNIX pic format and vice versa. The promised summary of responses is easy: No one had a translator; two people asked what cgm was. I am surprised so I will broaden the question. What is the best way to solve this very common situation: We have people doing assorted text editing AND lots of graphics vugraphs on an assortment of machines. Often we need to take part of a vugraph and include it as a figure in a document. Often we want to share pictures amongst ourselves via e-mail. Often it would be nice to draw most of a picture and then send it to our "computer-aided art" department for beautification. About half the people use UNIX-based machines, drawing with a picture editor that outputs UNIX/pic format files (i.e.CIP on 630's). Documents, figures and vugraphs are troffed on a shared printer. About half the people use DOS-based machines, a variety of picture editors and usually have their own printers for graphics. Documents are usually still troffed on a UNIX host with figures pasted in. What we need is a common graphics metafile format that can be translated to and from by all these things. UNIX experts say that Postscript is now the de facto standard metafile. DOS experts say that essentially no DOS-based drawing packages accept Postscript as input (they all output it, of course, to printers). The metafile format becoming the standard for DOS-applications is ANSI standard cgm. Had I found a pic<->cgm translator, CGM would make a good metafile with translation to and from UNIX/pic for troffing and for use with CIP. What do I do now? AL MILEWSKI ...att..!ihnp4!homxb!aemil