Primitive Drawing Tool
June 1st, 2006 by 
Multimedia Mike
“Primitive” might be the wrong word. What tool might I create simple, instructive pictures for a technical topic like, for example, the Understanding VC-1 Wiki page? Sometimes, a picture explains an algorithm better that a wall of bulleted text. Ideally, this would be a tool that runs under Linux and is free. Open source is is nice, on principle, but in this case I’m more interested in something that works already so I don’t have to modify it.
Posted in General | 
8 Comments »
June 1st, 2006 at 10:38 am
xfig?
June 1st, 2006 at 12:05 pm
Wow, that’s primitive alright, [maven]. :) Primitive-looking, at least. But it seems to be quite feature-rich. I will try it out and see if I can draw what I’ve been thinking about.
June 1st, 2006 at 3:49 pm
If you don’t want wysiwyg metapost might work well. Even neater would be embedding metapost code inline in the wiki.
June 1st, 2006 at 7:15 pm
I just noticed that OpenOffice, which I already have installed, has a Draw component which may be worth looking into.
June 2nd, 2006 at 4:57 am
xfig works fine once you get used to it.
June 2nd, 2006 at 2:02 pm
I’d use inkscape
June 2nd, 2006 at 8:39 pm
I found useful to write primary disagrams in XFig and do further editing/adjustments in Inkscape and/or Sodipodi (it’s hard to install Inkscape onto my rather ancient computer).
BTW, I don’t know present situation but I used specially patched fig2dev (patched by me) to produce correct SVGs, standard one writes incorrect information for circles and picture metrics are way too big.
June 8th, 2006 at 12:26 am
xfig is very good and what I have used for many years
in all my published work and teaching material.