beck@gefion.cs.cornell.edu (Micah Beck) (08/08/89)
A new subrelease of the TransFig package is available from svax.cs.cornell.edu by anonymous FTP or from sun.soe.clarkson.edu from the archive server. Differences from release 4a are mainly small fixes and improvements. Two translations from other graphics representations to Fig code are in the works: from Xpic intermediate code and from the Unix plot format. One issue which I've dealt with partially in Release 4b is how to estimate the bounding box of a text object. If the text includes formatting commands (LaTex or Troff), there is no good way for fig2dev to know its size. Thus, the bounding box can end up the wrong size, leading to incorrect figure placement. The current solution is to have the driver specify one of two options: include or exclude the horizontal extent of a text object from the bounding box calculation. So PostScript for instance must always include it, whereas in LaTeX picture mode it is excluded. This means that if the bounding box is determined by a text object, the LaTeX driver may get it wrong. I think there is no good way to deal with this unless Fig were given typesetting info of some kind. However if anyone has a clever suggestion I'd love to hear about it. Micah Beck beck@cs.cornell.edu Cornell Dept. of Computer Science