Which drawing program?

[Chris Carlen]

Hi folks:

I abandoned effort recently on a document that I was preparing in OpenOffice mostly because the equations looked really awful. Furthermore, I failed at convincing anybody in the OpenOffice/StarOffice world that they are not up to the standards that I think are needed for professional publication.

Then I tried Lyx. The equations I was able to produce within 15 minutes of working through that part of the tutorial were so stunningly beautiful, that I was immediately convinced that I must learn to use Lyx/Latex.

Trouble is, I have to do drawings too, and I have discovered that I can't import the .eps files exported by OpenOffice Draw into Lyx. Furthermore, the .eps files crash the ghostscript interpreter when running most of the commands I've tried to use to fix the problem, like eps2eps, epstool, etc.

I am convinced there is something very wrong with .eps exported from OpenOffice. Which brings us to my first question:

1. Does anyone here use OpenOffice to produce figures to import into Lyx, and if so how do you generate the .eps files?

Since I have had so much trouble trying to get my drawings done in OOo to be useable in Lyx, I think I might just give up and draw them over again in a new program. I have tried drawing some scribbles in Xfig, and exported them to Lyx successfully on the first try, in contrast to the hours I've wasted feeding the .eps from OOo through sequences of commands to no avail.

My interest at this point focusses on Tgif and Xfig. Honestly I would much prefer to use OOo Draw, because I am used to it and I will still use OOo for other things in which the integration of the Draw program with the other modules is useful. Xfig and Tgif seem a little bit crude, coming from the dark ages of UNIX GUI interfaces, so it seems. But I understand as well that they are nonetheless very good drawing programs.

The question then is:

2. What program is used most often, and what might you recommend?

I have noticed that my SuSE 8.1 distribution of Linux has an abundance of documentation for xfig, but there doesn't seem to be anything for tgif. This might move me in the direction of xfig.

Finally, there is one trick I'd like to do that was quite easy in OOo, and that is to include equations in a figure. I suppose with something like xfig I will have to hand format text objects into the arrangement I want to do this. The equations I need in a figure are usually simple fractions with a couple variables in the num. and denoms.

Any tips on how the masters do this trick?

Thanks for comments.

Good day!






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Christopher R. Carlen
Principal Laser/Optical Technologist
Sandia National Laboratories CA USA
[EMAIL PROTECTED]