rosen@polar.bu.edu (David B. Rosen) (05/09/91)
It recently occurred to me that being able to import TeX-formatted
text and equations into the idraw drawing editor would make an
extremely powerful combination for interactive construction of
integrated text/graphics presentations, slides, etc.
Once paragraphs and equations were typed into your favorite flavor of
[La]TeX, you would produce a .dvi file, which would then be converted
to idraw format by a "dvi2idraw" program which would place each
character or string (and graphic object) as an idraw object. Then one
could cut, paste, group, move, and scale these (mostly text) objects
and combine them with other (hand-drawn or program-generated) idraw
graphics interactively.
For some applications this would be far superior to the current method
of including the drawing in the TeX document using a \special command,
which does not allow interactive placement of TeX text and symbols
relative to the included figure. In any case, once you had produced
your idraw figure complete with imported TeX output, it could still be
included within another TeX document.
This would also address some of the limitations of idraw's own text
handling, namely not being able to format subscripts or multiple
fonts/styles/sizes in a single text object.
Can anyone comment on how difficult it might be to adapt dvips to
produce idraw output? I believe Philip Dye (phdye@cs.cmu.edu) already
has an idraw I/O library as described in the interviews mailing list.
(He was also working on a MacDraw library and idraw/MacDraw
conversion.) If this idea isn't shot down for various reasons, would
anyone like to volunteer to implement it?
[As some of you know, Gnu Graphics (qed.rice.edu:pub) and XGraph
(export.lcs.mit.edu:contrib) are already able to produce idraw output.
Thus idraw can already combine hand-drawn graphics with the output of
data-plotting programs, or any programs calling the Gnu Graphics
(extended Un*x Plot) libraries.]
[For those in comp.text.tex not familiar with idraw, it is a
MacDraw-like drawing editor for X11, included with the InterViews
toolkit, which is available via anon. ftp from
interviews.stanford.edu. See comp.windows.interviews. The idraw file
format is a (specially annotated) form of EPSF, so it can be printed
directly on a postscript printer.]
--
David B Rosen, Cognitive & Neural Systems Internet: rosen@cns.bu.edu
Center for Adaptive Systems Bitnet: rosen%kenmore AT BUACCA
Boston University. UUCP: {harvard,uunet}!bu.edu!bucasb!rosen
"Says who? I speak for nobody, except occasionally myself."