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.
The 'pic' program allows the user to type in a "plain English" diagram description, which is fairly strightforward to learn to use.
Then 'pic' itself translates this into troff markup, which is then piped into troff which in turn produces a renderable output of the page (by default in PostScript).
For something like a circuit diagram, which may contain several instances of a particular symbol (for several such symbols), you can define a macro once and for all for each symbol which can be given parameters as needed for position, size, shape, ...
For such a purpose, to make your circuit diagram look "kosher", you would need a repertoire of standard symbols for particular types of circuit element. When you first posted about this, I had a quick poke around on the web and found a few sources. In particular see:
http://www.ece.uwaterloo.ca/~aplevich/Circuit_macros
which is the README page from
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/graphics/circuit_macros
As can be seen, these macros are 'pic' macros, even though the ultimate intention is to feed them to TeX for the final formatting. However, as 'pic' macros they can simply be used in 'pic' and the results fed to 'troff' as God and Nature intended!
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'.
Back on March 29 of this year, Srdjan Todorovic asked a similar question about using Linux to create a "TCP-header" table:
"Lets say I'm documenting a low-level protocol or file format and want to produce a picture such as the TCP header (etc) table (http://izecksohn.com/pedro/pub/tcp_header.jpg), what's the best program to use for that?
Another example: http://www.wtcs.org/snmp4tpc/images/TCP-Header.jpg
I have tried Openoffice drawing tool in Writer, and it does not align well. Inkscape might be good as I can snap to grid.
I could use a spreadsheet and then export to picture.
Is there a special purpose application for this that anyone has used and would reccommend?
I need to be able to insert text into the cells or perhaps refer to the cells in some markup way - also the cells should be fixed width as each cell would represent one byte."
See the thread starting at http://lists.alug.org.uk/pipermail/main/2010-March/027163.html my response at http://lists.alug.org.uk/pipermail/main/2010-March/027165.html and my follow-up at http://lists.alug.org.uk/pipermail/main/2010-March/027167.html
Using his "Another example" above, I was able, using fairly simple 'pic' with 'troff' to produce a nice version of it. For the result, go to
http://www.zen89632.zen.co.uk/Misc
and look at the file tcpheader.pdf (or tcpheader.ps ), and compare it with the original example at http://www.wtcs.org/snmp4tpc/images/TCP-Header.jpg
The troff input (which includes the 'pic' code) of it all is in the file tcpheader.tr in that web page; and the explanatory "howto" is in the file tcpheader_howto.pdf
To come back to your specific query, I have really almost no experience of drawing circuit diagrams as such.
However, if you would supply a pointer to a typical picture of the sort of thing you want to do, I'll have a go at emulating it (in the same spirit as I did for Srdjan). Once you get the hang of it, doing this sort of thing this way is fairly straightforward, and produces very high quality output.
Ted.
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