Re: [Groff] Re: gpic question?

[Zvezdan Petkovic]

On Wed, Feb 02, 2005 at 03:59:04AM -0700, address@hidden wrote:
> gpic and pic are fine programs, but what if one needs to draw a circuit 
> schematic? xcircuit you say? I find even xcircuit lacking as regards the 
> built-in set of symbols. So what is necessary? A portable gpic frontend to 
> ease some burden of our shoulders, supporting a truck-load of symbols 
> maybe... 

I admit it requires a work on your part.
For teaching Computer Architecture, I have written a set of macros for
Karnaugh maps and another one for logic gates that receive a parameter
and thus can produce Karnaugh maps with variable dimensions or gates
oriented in different directions.
The ability to point a gate in a different direction is my main grudge
against some drawing programs.  The authors obviously think that they
should always go left to right, or even worse bottom to top (Kivio does
this).  The only program that supports all I need is XCircuit.
I use XCircuit a lot for single images.

However, to produce an animated presentation with gpresent and Acrobat
Reader, I find it easier to use pic, simply inserting .PAUSE in the
picture itself.  Picture happens to be just a lot of calls to these
macros from my library.

The other option I tried is using XFig with MMP (multiple MetaPost)
output.  Save the parts of the picture that you want to appear on a
slide after each .PAUSE as different decreasing "layers" in XFig.
Export the picture from XFig in MMP format (I really run fig2dev from
the Makefile).  In troff source put a mark (.mk) before the first .PSPIC
command, then .PAUSE, .rt, next .PSPIC, .PAUSE, .rt, ...
You get the idea.
But then, again, most of such pictures can be produced with pic too.

Best regards,

        Zvezdan Petkovic