Actually it is simple. CorelDraw and Aldus FreeHand come
to mind, particularly since they are the apps I have used
in the past. I almost was to the point of trying to install
an old CorelDraw 3.0 I have and see it I could get it to run
under wine...anything to avoid windoze. I would be loathe
to have to had given up and admitted linux defeat. Since
I did get StarOffice to ultimately handle it, all is well
again. Failure would have meant I had to go to school to
do this basic stuff on one of the Macs or PCs running
Doze. In any case...
I am truly disappointed in tgif. This is a nice app that,
on the surface, has all the graphics tools I could want
but it is a FATAL flaw for what you see on the screen to
be only loosely associated with what prints. All highlighting
boxes and arrows to text I made, which looked perfect on
screen, ALL came out of the printer more and more displaced
on the printout as you moved from left to right on the page.
As for the Gimp, I assume there is a plugin or something I
am not seeing since I could see no drawing tool that would
create boxes, whether with colored borders, filled with color
or some grey tone, or pattern (which could then be moved to
the back or behind text or whatever). It was such
as these that I needed to highlight certain text fields and
data fields.
Lyx...I like Lyx but I could find no way to do the above
either. You can insert ps or other graphics into a page
but I could find no way to do what I list above, draw lines,
boxes or other shapes into and among the text.
Killustrator: not even close to being truly useful.
xfig can't do it (so it seems...I just downloaded it and
tried to see about pasting text into it) - wont import
basic ascii text.
One thing common to all computers that
people use is ascii text - with or without LF-CR, which
could be eliminated after pasting, if necessary. ALL
wordprocessors, all graphic utilities that can work
with text created within the app, should be able, at
the very least, to import and understand ascii. Sure,
they can have their own preferred format but, bottom
line, for full inter-operability, ascii should be
understood.
As for making my own ps filter...it wouldn't work with
what I needed. I had to visually inspect the data
fields and make judgements, case by case, what was important
or not. It would likely have taken a major "programming"
project on my part to simply highlight certain bits
of information...an area within which my skills are
weak to nonexistent right now. I intend to teach myself
C/C++ and a few scripting languages as time permits, but
that is a luxury not available until I finish my degree.
-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Browder [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Saturday, November 20, 1999 11:29 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: recipient.list.not.shown
Subject: Re: Need a good vector drawing app
I'm not sure this is a case of SIMPLE graphics. What Windows program
can hndle the job that you want?
It is easy to create what you want with PostScript by editing it
directly,
or using, say, Perl to read in your text files and create PS files
that
print beautifully. You can also work the problem somewhat
interactively
by checking you progress using Ghostview. But if you want WYSIWYG
and interactive applications, I'm not sure what the solution is. I
have had
good luck with xfig, but if you are working with a LOT of data,
writing
your own PS filter is the way to go in my opinion. I have done that
for
--
To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe"
as the Subject.
