beck@hermod.cs.cornell.edu (Micah Beck) (03/21/90)
Version 2.0 of the XFig graphics editor is now available as contributed software with X11R4. It was developed from earlier versions of XFig by Brian Smith of Livermore Labs (envbvs@epbs.lbl.gov), as is available by anonymous FTP from expo.lcs.mit.edu. Brian has made various improvements and extensions of XFig; in order to support new features, he has defined an extension to the file format used by Fig to store graphics and transmit them to output routines. The original format version was 1.4; his extension is called 1.4X 1.4X is not completely compatible with 1.4-TFX, the format supported by the TransFig back end utility for Fig. It is oriented towards PostScript output, particularly in the specification of text fonts. 1.4X is supported only by f2ps, the Fig-to-PS utility distributed with XFig 2.0; thus, it cannot be translated to LaTeX-compatible output languages using TransFig. In order to make XFig 2.0 useful to LaTeX/TransFig users, a compile-time compatibility mode has been added in patchlevel 4. When XFig 2.0 is compiled with the preprocessor flag -DTFX, it is compatible with 1.4-TFX, and thus with TransFig. So if you hear that XFig 2.0 only supports PS output, don't believe it! TransFig Release 5a is now available; the main difference from release 4 is that the transfig command is now implemented as a C program rather than a shell script and so is much faster. Other than that, bug fixes. TransFig is available via anonymous FTP from svax.cs.cornell.edu in ~ftp/pub/fig/transfig.tar.Z, or by mail from the archive server at sun.soe.clarkson.edu. Micah Beck Cornell CS Dept beck@cs.cornell.edu