Another lwn.net excerpt and link """ In Praise of Pic (O'Reilly) Philipp K. Janert, Ph.D. looks at Pic on O'Reilly. "With all the elaborate 3D graphics packages out there today, it's easy to forget that sometimes all you want to do is draw a nice 2D diagram. Philipp Janert takes us on a stroll down memory lane with pic, a command-line based tool that can prove very useful." """
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2007/06/21/in-praise-of-pic.html This is a nice 2-page summary of capabilities and example of usage. I liked this paragraph from his article """ But there is yet another reason for studying pic. It is an excellent example how powerful a "little language" can be. In particular, I was impressed how pic achieves great ease of use through meaningful defaults, which often seem to anticipate the "common case" very well. It can do so, in part because its application area is intentionally quite limited: black-and-white drawings of regular shapes. Because the job it is meant to do is small, pic itself can be simple. """ Someone (cdl, probably) can correct me if I have this wrong, but I believe pic output is roff directives and data. Typically it is processed by roff (troff, groff) to produce postscript. Ah, wait I see -- "Pic itself is merely a pre-processor for troff". He includes a pointer on converting resultant ps to anything else, via the intermediary of eps (using ps2eps) which (eg) imagemagick can read and perform the final conversion on. Regards, ..jim -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
