[Tugindia] Drawing figures for latex documents

[S. venkataraman]

Subject: [Tugindia] Drawing figures for latex documents

I shall be happy if someone can tell me where  to find software, free or
cheap, which will allow me to draw figures consisting mainly of straight
lines, arrows, parts of circles or other curves etc., to be used in
Latex documents.
Thanks, 
D.Owen
Hi!,
There is yet another alternative.  You can try TEXCAD4.1.  This is the 
(one of the)Windows successor(s) to texcad that was available with emtex
distribution. 
You can draw lines of arbitrary slopes if you use emtex 
specials.  Miktex and dvips support emtex specials. I think tetex also
supports emtex specials.  You can also use specials provided by epic 
package. You have to add the line \usepackage{epic}. 
You can also save portions of the picture as a macro and use it as many
times as you want. 
You can translate, rotate and reflect portions of the picture. 
You save the picture as a .tex file. You can incorporate the contents of
the file directly into the tex file or you input the file by \input
file_name.tex.  I have had only one  problem. It leaves lot of space
below the figure and I am not sure if it is because of a bug in the
package. Otherwise the package is quite stable and eminently usable.
Best of luck,
S. Venkataraman