[Xcircuit-dev] XCircuit & LaTeX

[R. Timothy Edwards]

Dear Makram,

   Okay, you caught my interest, and I spent a whole day on it, and now
XCircuit can handle LaTeX-formatted strings.  The new functionality is
in the xcircuit-3.1.32 distribution on the XCircuit website.

   It works similarly to the xfig-style handling of LaTeX strings, but
with a few differences.  You create a text label in the file, and
select "Text->LaTeX mode" from the XCircuit menu, setting a bit which
tells XCircuit to treat this as a LaTeX string, not an XCircuit string.
Then you can throw in any valid LaTeX syntax into the string.  When
you write the file back to disk, XCircuit will note if there is at
least one LaTeX-formatted string on the page.  If so, it will generate
an accompanying ".tex" file, containing an "epsfig" statement to
include the original XCircuit file, followed by a flattened list of
all the LaTeX labels, positioned in the coordinate system of LaTeX.

   If you run ghostview on the XCircuit file itself, you will find
that the labels do not appear in the output.  The PostScript interpreter
ignores them, and lets the LaTeX compiler handle them instead.

   Because the "epsfig" line is embedded in the file XCircuit writes,
the only way to resize the figure is by adjusting the scale of the
figure in XCircuit before writing the output.  This is a minor
inconvenience, and I may do something about it in the future.
Another thing to note is that LaTeX controls the size of all the
labels, not XCircuit.  So the default text size will match the size
of the surrounding text in the LaTeX document, and any resizing can
be done by the usual LaTeX font sizing statements just prior to
including the XCircuit ".tex" file.  This feature is intentional; it
prevents text on a figure from being unreadable.  If you want
control over the scale of each label, LaTeX size formatting commands
can be put directly into the label string.

   I think this is a very useful feature for XCircuit, and I thank
you for sending on the example files which let me figure out how to
make it work.  Note that I have only barely tested the function, so
you should let me know of any problems or quirky behavior.

					Regards,
					Tim


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