[pstricks] pstricks and xfig

[Franco Bagnoli]

On Tue, 29 Apr 2003, Denis Girou wrote:

> 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.

I agree, but I also find rather annoying the complete absence of a 
graphical interface. First of all, one may want just to scratch something 
and then refine it by hand or agorithmically. And then, when one is 
building complex images, it is not always evident which is the code 
representing a given part. 

Leaving aside Xfig, I find extremely useful the approach of pst-eucl, i.e. 
first define some reference point and then describe the relations among 
them. This is even more useful for putting labels in 3D plots, since I do 
not want generally to have label rotated with axes. 

I was thinking if this approach could be used for a limited interactive 
graphical interface: Let's suppose I can define an object based on some 
reference points. In the very simple case, the reference point is just 
the argument of \rput istruction. 

It is relatively easy to tranform these points into "handles", in a way
similar to xfig, even without interactive redrawing of the figure. One
possibility is for instance to generate a clickable map in a html
document, or maybe using pdf+javascript or finally developing a custom
interface.




-- 
Franco Bagnoli (franchino) <franco.bagnoli at unifi.it> (bagnoli at dma.unifi.it)
virtual location: Dipartimento di Energetica "S. Stecco"
real location: Dip. Matematica Applicata "G. Sansone", Universita' Firenze,
Via S. Marta, 3 I-50139 Firenze, Italy. Tel. +39 0554796422, fax: +39 055471787
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