[Xcircuit-dev] Suggestion: change in LaTeX output rendering

[R. Timothy Edwards]

Dear Alex,

> I already sent the message below to the /xcircuit-dev/ mailing list, but 
> it seems to be inactive since january, so I decided to send this e-mail 
> directly to you. I hope I'm not bothering you.

There have been postings to xcircuit-dev as recently as June 4, although
apparently yours never showed up.  I posted a couple of test messages that
came through okay, so I forwarded your message to the mailing list.

> I'm an Electric Engineering student from Brazil and I've been using 
> XCircuit for a few months now. Since I've always used LaTeX to typeset 
> my papers, I found very usefull the LaTeX integration provided by 
> XCircuit. However, I had a few issues in the beginning when trying to 
> center align my circuits in the LaTeX document.
> 
> What I did was to put everything inside a parbox, with the .eps width as 
> the box width. I also exchanged '\epsfig' whit '\includegraphics' (in my 
> case it's usefull because I use pdflatex, so I convert my .eps to .pdf 
> with 'epstopdf'). Those changes alone would improve the current output 
> since it would be possible to center the drawing in the page. The best 
> thing about my "code" I think it is the use of 'scalebox', that allows 
> me to scale the graphics together with the text. That is pretty awesome! 
> I'm so happy with my solution that I decided to share it! I hope that 
> everyone like it as much as I did and that it can be incorporated to 
> XCircuit (since I don't see dificulty to implement the changes, at 
> first). It's also worth noting that my suggestion sort of solves the 
> issues reported in the Reference Manual.

Your solution neatly solves all the issues brought up in the reference
manual comments, and I have gone ahead and implemented it exactly as
you described, testing it on a couple of examples I have on my computer.
I have left your parbox width and small spacing offset as written,
because they don't seem to be derived from anything in particular.  I
derived the scale factor in the output from the "scale" value in
xcircuit for the figure, for what it's worth.  If you find anything
wrong with the implementation, please let me know.  And thanks for
sharing your solution!  That's what makes Open Source work.

					Regards,
					Tim

+--------------------------------+-------------------------------------+
| Dr. R. Timothy Edwards (Tim)   | email: tim.edwards at multigig.com     |
| MultiGiG, Inc.                 | web:   http://www.multigig.com      |
| 100 Enterprise Way, Suite A-3  | phone: (831) 621-3283               |
| Scotts Valley, CA 95066        | cell:  (240) 401-0616               |
+--------------------------------+-------------------------------------+