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Xfig

mcj.sourceforge.net

11–20 of 44 posts

Re: Xfig

#11

I used to often reach for xfig for a quick tech diagram (boxes, circles, lines, etc). The "fig" file format, being text, is easy to drop into source control. It's fast and gets the job done. The feeling I get from peers, especially those who've never understood that unix/linux on desktop has long been a thing or really lived that far out of the Win32/MacOS ecosystem, look at you sideways when the file extension isn't…

I guess xfig could be considered modern when twm was young, and I was playing with IBM X Windows thin clients on our university lab.

Re: Xfig

#12

I used to often reach for xfig for a quick tech diagram (boxes, circles, lines, etc). The "fig" file format, being text, is easy to drop into source control. It's fast and gets the job done. The feeling I get from peers, especially those who've never understood that unix/linux on desktop has long been a thing or really lived that far out of the Win32/MacOS ecosystem, look at you sideways when the file extension isn't…

> The "fig" file format, being text, is easy to drop into source control.

Yes, and using transfig it can be transformed into whatever format you need. So, for instance, you can have a complete LaTeX document with .fig figures (and a Makefile to "compile" everything) in a repository.

By the way, like Ipe mentioned in another comment, it is possible to use TeX formatting in xfig and the .fig format (using the "special" attribute) to produce some especially nice figures for scientific documents.

Re: Xfig

#13

I used to often reach for xfig for a quick tech diagram (boxes, circles, lines, etc). The "fig" file format, being text, is easy to drop into source control. It's fast and gets the job done. The feeling I get from peers, especially those who've never understood that unix/linux on desktop has long been a thing or really lived that far out of the Win32/MacOS ecosystem, look at you sideways when the file extension isn't…

The simple text format also makes it somewhat scriptable, so you could make more complex figures than you could make with a mouse, without learning Postscript.

Re: Xfig

#14

I used to often reach for xfig for a quick tech diagram (boxes, circles, lines, etc). The "fig" file format, being text, is easy to drop into source control. It's fast and gets the job done. The feeling I get from peers, especially those who've never understood that unix/linux on desktop has long been a thing or really lived that far out of the Win32/MacOS ecosystem, look at you sideways when the file extension isn't…

As someone who used xfig a lot, I have to say that Inkscape is a good successor, so I only look back for nostalgic reasons such as now.

Re: Xfig

#15
I used xfig back in the day, but it always felt more like the tool I had than the one I wanted. It’s been a long while since I tried inkscape - I remember it more as a took for artists than for technical drawings.

These days my go to tool for technical diagrams is draw.io (aka diagrams.net). I tend to use the standalone version but appreciate that it’s available online with low friction and as a confluence plugin. Perhaps my favorite part is that you can create png files that are viewable anywhere but are also editable due to the source file being embedded in the png.

Re: Xfig

#16
post #8

Awesome that Xfig still around. I used Xfig for the illustrations to my master's thesis back in the day when Inkscape was new, because it felt like Inkscape is trying to make precise alignment difficult on purpose. It still feels the same.

I've used it for things like exactly like you say where you need specific/explicit alignment that you can define in numbers, but like some kind of sweet spot between freehand and cad.

Recently I used it to lay out a cut path for a sheet of material that goes under the keyboard of a vintage computer.

It was just the right amount of quick vs capable for a job like that. The drawing is 90% repetitions of a few objects (like one key shape), and regular alignment of multiple copies of those objects (keys in a row) in array groups (the F keys, the #,Q,A,Z rows, the arrow keys, etc), and regular alignment of groups with other groups (vertical spacing of the rows), with a little bit of arbitrary positioning (horizontal offset of the A row from the Q row, etc).

I don't remember what difficulty I exactly ran into, but I tried inkscape and qcad and somehow neither made it obvious how to attain the result I wanted, but I popped it right out in xfig with only a little fumbling around.

And now that definition is an accessible document. xfig is a small program and of course free & open source, so it's likely always going to be available, but the file is also usable directly if needed, even if it's so far in the future that xfig would require a lot of work to set up some vm just to run it. That must be why I didn't use a 2d sketch in freecad.

Re: Xfig

#17

I'd love if Inkscape implemented Xfig technical drawing features.

Yes, this.

Also, I wrote a small library that lets me programmatically generate SVGs with Python. This lets me create very precise vector images. This fills some of the same needs.

Re: Xfig

#18
So here is my figure drawing exercise: draw a ruler. This is easy to do with xfig. On many tools, it's hopeless, open office draw comes to mind.

Re: Xfig

#19
post #17

I'd love if Inkscape implemented Xfig technical drawing features.

Yes, this. Also, I wrote a small library that lets me programmatically generate SVGs with Python. This lets me create very precise vector images. This fills some of the same needs.

There you go, 2d openscad. I want that.

Re: Xfig

#20

So here is my figure drawing exercise: draw a ruler. This is easy to do with xfig. On many tools, it's hopeless, open office draw comes to mind.

It is much easier to draw in Inkscape. As an example, you can draw a curve and add the "Ruler" Live Path Effect.
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