VI. Are there any (CAD) drawing programs for X?

1. xfig (Facility for Interactive Generation of figures), originally written by Supoj Sutanthavibul, is a menu-driven drawing program that may be used to draw and manipulate objects interactively in an X window. It comes with a translator package (transfig, also available at ftp.x.org) that allows xfig drawings to be converted to sundry other formats including LaTeX, PostScript, PiCTeX, etc. xfig can also import encapsulated PostScript files that can be annotated. xfig features primitive objects: circles, ellipses, arcs, etc. that may be grouped into complex objects and scaled, rotated, and manipulated in various ways.

   xfig is now maintained by Brian V. Smith (he certainly answers all the queries posted); the latest version, 3.2.2, is at:

   epb1.lbl.gov/xfig

   ftp.x.org/contrib/applications/drawing_tools/xfig/

   You also need to get the TransFig package which contains the post-processor needed by xfig to convert fig files to one of several output formats.

   The TransFig package is in:

   ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/applications/drawing_tools/transfig/

   I'm including the url for a list of CTAN (Comprehensive TeX Archive Network) archives here because it's handy.

   Ian MacPhedran maintains a page about other software that use the FIG protocol.

2. tgif, developed by William Chia-Wei Cheng, also features primitive objects: circles, ellipses, arcs, etc. that may be grouped into complex objects and scaled, rotated, and manipulated in various ways. It also supports "building-block" objects that can be made part of a library of objects which are stored as Prolog code. tgif can also generate PostScript, and xbm (x-bitmap files) compatible output.

   tgif also supports the retrieval of tgif (obj and sym) files from HTTP servers. Hypertext jumps are supported using the old tgif teleporting or traveling mechanism.

   The latest version, 4.1.22, is available at:

   ftp://bourbon.cs.umd.edu/pub/tgif/tgif-4.1.22.tar.gz

   ftp://cs.ucla.edu:/pub/tgif/tgif-4.1.22.tar.Z

3. Refer to part 4 of the comp.lang.tcl FAQ for an extensive list of drawing editors (picasso, for one) that have been written with Tcl/Tk. The latest version of the FAQ is always available at:

   ftp://ftp.neosoft.com/languages/tcl/alcatel/docs/tcl-faq.part04.gz

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