On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 09:18:53PM -0000, Ted Harding wrote:
On 22-Dec-10 12:55:14, Chris G wrote:
On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 07:25:26PM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
[snip]
I really don't want specific devices because I want to have circuit diagrams to wire from rather than analyse the circuit's operation.
I have gEDA installled and it's one of my possibles.
Chris Green
If it's just a schematic, then for diagrams of any such kind I would first think of using 'pic', one of the "preprocessor" programms in the groff [ = GNU troff ] suite. The the 'troff' program itself is a generic document-formatting program, driven by in-line "markup" tags (just as TeX and HTML are markup languages). In principle you can place arbitrary marks at arbitray positions on the page.
Yes, I know nroff/troff, I used to be the only person at work who could maintain old documentation written in nroff format.
[snip about pic]
However, if you don't need really kosher-looking circuit element symbols, you could probably create your own (or I could, if I knew what you wanted them to look like). So, if you could post a URL to an image of the sort of circuit diagram you want to draw, I would be happy to have a go at creating in it 'pic | troff'.
That's not *quite* where I want to be. I want to be able to draw out a circuit, think about it, realise it's not correct (or that there are better ways of doing things) and then change it accordingly. It's one of the few areas (similarly with forms design) where I think a GUI is actually the best way of doing it. Moving an element from one corner of the diagram to another is trivial with a GUI, especially one that 'fixes' the wires onto the elements. Doing the same with pic would be much more difficult I think.
Yes, I know the *initial* circuit drawing wants to pencil and paper, that's even better than a GUI but after that I want to make a more permanent record that I can refer to easily. As the boat is several hours away keeping that permanent record on a computer I can access from anywhere is an ideal solution. You don't end up with a scruffy piece of paper with fingerprints all over it either.