karsten@uni-paderborn.de (Karsten Brinkmann) (06/17/91)
Dear TeXnichans! I need a good advise: I'm typesetting a manusscript of a lecture called 'indtroduction to computer science theory', using plain TeX, because I've learned TeX with the master's book. 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 a SUN workstation, running X) to draw postscript-graphics and the TeX macro package 'psfig' to include them. 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! Karsten
beck@CS.Cornell.EDU (Micah Beck) (06/17/91)
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