[vox-tech] Rant: LaTeX graphics programs

[Jonathan Stickel]

Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> I need to vent frustration.
> 
> Xfig has got to be the single most un-user friendly piece of software I've
> ever seen.  I experience physical pain everytime I use it.
> 
> It's NOT a hyperbole to say that I can do most diagrams faster by coding the
> picture environment by hand than drawing the equivalent diagram with xfig.
> Maybe if xfig developers stole the Gimp interface things would be better.
> As it stands, it looks like a musty UNIX(TM) application from the 80's.
> Looks like Xaw or something.  Congress should do something useful for a
> change, like outlawying the X toolkit.
> 
> My hat is off to anyone on this list who is actually handy with this
> monstrosity.

Well, I think I'm rather handy with Xfig.  It certainly does have a way 
of doing things that is quite different from most "drawing" programs. 
But once I figured out its quirks I actually like it.  The only thing 
that gets to me is when typing in a box, the mouse cursor MUST stay in 
the box.

> 
> Dia's interface is OK, but doesn't give me a lot of control over the
> objects.  Its font stuff almost never works right when you view the final
> LaTeX dvi/postscript.  Dia also seems to have wierd scaling issues when
> exporting to tex format.  Also, Dia is WYSIAWYG (what you see is almost what
> you get).
> 
> What I really want is a program like Macromedia Flash that can export to a
> LaTeX picture environment format.
> 

There are dozens of different ways to get a figure into Latex.  I prefer 
to create an eps/pdf which I then insert, and it doesn't matter so much 
to me how that eps/pdf is created as long as it looks right.  It seems 
that you want figures to be a Latex picture that you input.  One 
possibility is to make an eps with some other program (Dia?), convert to 
xfig with 'pstoedit', and then convert the xfig to Latex picture.  I 
know it's not ideal, and maybe the figure gets garbled along the way, 
but you could try it.

Jonathan