[pstricks] pstricks and xfig

[Denis Girou]

>>>>> "Franco.Bagnoli" == Franco Bagnoli <franco.bagnoli at unifi.it> writes:

    Franco.Bagnoli> I was asked about pstricks and xfig. It does not seem to exist a fig2dev 
    Franco.Bagnoli> filter to pstricks, but I suppose it should be rather easy to be done. Am 
    Franco.Bagnoli> I right? 

  Somebody wrote such driver some years ago (I saw it.) I do not know if it
was submitted to Brian Smith, the Xfig's author, or not, but in any case it
was never publicly available, as far as I know.

  There are other tools, in the class of Xfig (like Dia, jPicEdt, LaTeXdraw,
etc. -you could found their Web home pages in the Links page on the PSTricks
home page), which have a PSTricks output driver, but I do not believe that
adding such feature to Xfig is a huge task. All the major problem (from my
personal point of vue), is that these two approaches are mainly orthogonal:
all the power of PSTricks come from the fact that this is not an interactive
tool but a programming language (in fact the conjunction of two ones, TeX and
PostScript), which allows to think in terms of algorithms and computational
geometry. If you build a complex tree with an interactive tool, you will not
be able to do interesting things with a PSTricks output based on a long list
of \ps...box and \psline but only if you can handle the \pstree structure
describing the logical hierarchy of roots and leaves nodes.

D.G.