[Xcircuit-dev] Re: XCircuit

[R. Timothy Edwards]

Dear Dick,

> I compiled xcircuit 3.2.8 with asg under linux, but couldn't find
> any documentation or menu items to use/experiment with the new
> functionality. I also didn't find 'undo/redo' in the menus. Any
> quick suggestions to help me get started?

Whoa, don't get too far ahead on the alpha testing!

No documentation is provided because, at the moment, aggressive (read:
"normal") use of the ASG functions tend to crash the program.  Plus, they
are not deemed usable at the moment.  They are in the distribution mostly
because I don't want to have to maintain separate distributions with and
without the feature.

Basic functionality is provided by the menu item "File->Import SPICE" when
ASG is enabled at compile-time.  With the TCL interpreter also compiled
in, this function is also available on the TCL command line as the
command "page import spice <filename>".  If you do this, and the HSPICE
parser doesn't immediately quit the program because it saw something it
didn't like, you should end up with a schematic of the SPICE circuit,
except that (in this revision), pins and wires don't match up.  Steve
Frezza and I expect to rapidly develop the ASG functions in the next
month or two, so you should soon be able to get real, usable schematics
from a SPICE deck.  In the slightly longer term, we want to read Verilog
in addition to SPICE so you can generate digital logic schematics from
Verilog netlist output.

In this revision, the undo/redo function acts exactly like the "undelete"
function did before.  That is, only one function (delete) is implemented
in the undo/redo method (except that you can re-delete what you just
un-deleted).  The key "u" now executes the "undo" function (which, for
the reason just stated, is transparent to the end-user), and the key "U"
implements the "redo" function.  Last week, I implemented selections,
moves, page changes, and copies into the undo/redo method.  This is a
work in progress.  I think it will only be a couple more weeks before
I will get it in useful condition, at which point you will notice that
it is quite different from the original "undelete" function.

> Thanks for the recent Postscript changes ... I can now import an
> xcircuit schematic into a Framemaker 5.5 anchored frame, scale it and
> print it. It will now be possible to use xcircuit directly for design
> documentation in some of our technical documents. (This didn't work
> with earlier versions.)

Thanks for letting me know.  I have also been able to use the new rendering
function to import pages saved from "ghostview" into the background of
xcircuit pages, and use that to type over top of what was otherwise an
un-editable PDF document.

					Regards,
					Tim


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