2009/4/18 Svenn Are Bjerkem <[email protected]>:
> 2009/4/18 Fmiser <[email protected]>:
>> I often use the following command on my Debian system to create
>> full-page SVG exports of my multi-page xcircuit documents.
>>
>> $ pstoedit -f plot-svg -split in.ps out_page%d.svg
>>
>> The output files open fine for me in Inkscape. But my xcircuit
>> file is nearly always a full page.
>
> Over the years I have always come back to xcircuit for both circuit
> diagrams and general purpose drawing for documentation purposes,
> mostly because xcircuit handles small drawings just as well as it
> handles large drawings. Most other programs use drawing canvases of a
> specified printed page size and that either leaves a lot of space or
> truncates the drawing when exporting to png. Drawing circuits and
> blockdiagrams can't be done faster in any other open source tool that
> I know. Problem has always been Word not understanding PostScript
> properly.

Hi Tim et al,

Just adding a bit more to this thread in the hope that Tim will get
time to have svg export directly from xcircuit.

Since company documents are only accepted in word format, I had to
either draw all illustrations again in Visio or try to convert. Of
course, I tried to convert as I have to run Microsoft products in a
lame remote terminal. Visio can read svg images to an extent and I
used the programs 'poster' and 'pstoedit' to get from xcircuit .ps to
a .svg that Visio accepted. I also tried 'psresize' but those results
always came out in the original size. Scaling the drawing in Visio is
not feasible as the fonts don't scale and generally all artwork gets
skewed and disconnected. I use 'poster' to resize the .ps file to an
intermediate .ps file that 'pstoedit' converts to a .svg file. So far
I have not been able to turn off the cut-marks that 'poster' adds to
the .ps file it creates, but these can be deleted in Visio as soon as
all the groups are dissolved. Inkscape can be used to prep the .svg
just as well.

The result in Word is more than acceptable. If anybody will ever need
to change something in the drawing, they can do so via the Visio OLE
binding. Visio doesn't come with a fixed grid by default, so most
users won't discover that things are off-grid. They will only nag
about loose arrow-heads, as these are separate objects even in
xcircuit. :-)

What I see from the result is that dashed lines in xcircuit do not
convert well. Inkscape show them nicely, but I think Visio is doing
something during import. 'pstoedit' manage to keep them as complete
lines so a little fine-tuning may be nescessary, but no need to draw
everything new.

-- 
Svenn
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