Wanted - latex picture environment export
Submitted by Michael A. Peters
Link to original bug (#315951)
Description
Version details: dia-0.94-11 Distribution/Version: Fedora Core 4
I've not been particularly happy with the eps export capabilities of dia. Pango font option doesn't allow LaTeX symbols, the T1 option does, but placement needs work and I'd rather it NOT specify fonts, etc.
pstricks just doesn't want to work for me.
What I would like to see is something like what gnuplot does withe the pslatex terminal. It outputs a single .tex file, uses postscript for the image, anything text is below that and done with the picture environment \put commands.
This makes it easy to adjust the placement of the text and adjust the text itself if needed without needing to use anything more sophisticated than a text editor. No need to use pstricks or psfrag. And when working on a large document, you can write a script that strips the picture environment of the EPS stuff but leaving the text stuff, so that you can reduce time to compile the dvi but still have the layout and text of the images viewable.
To see a sample of what I'm talking about:
gnuplot> set terminal pslatex color
gnuplot> set output 'gnuplot.tex'
gnuplot> set format xy "%g
"
gnuplot> set format z "%g
"
gnuplot> set xrange[-4:4]
gnuplot> set yrange[-4:4]
gnuplot> f(x,y)=xx+xy
gnuplot> splot f(x,y) title "f(x,y)=x^2+xy
"
The resulting tex file can be input into your latex without needing to use any additional packages, you do have to go from dvi to ps since it includes postscript for the graph, the text part is all at the bottom in \put commands and can be manually adjusted as necessary without needing to run gnuplot again.
It is really slick, and I think it would be awesome if dia had an export option that did things that way.
Version: 0.94