fig2pstricks - convert xfig to pstricks

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News (2013-01-21)

Version 0.7.2 released (changelog.txt).

• Bug fix. Many thanks to the person who reported the bug and suggested a patch. See the following email. I just applied the patch and changed the version number.

  --- email begins here ---
  Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2012 17:20:18 +0200
  From: Bugs Beastie 
  Subject:  [PATCH] fig2pstricks text.c bugfix
  
  Hello!
  
  Not sure you are still maintaining this piece of code...
  
  Nevertheless I have found a bug in a text handling code.
  The problem manifests itself if there are text symbols with a code > 127
  in a .fig file. The assignment (integer) n = (signed char) *p at lines
  43 and 47 in text.c will result in a negative n and lead to the out-of-bound
  access at line 141 in text.c
  The attached patch is a quick band-aid, it is better to check the whole
  code for such errors and you know the code much better than me...
  
  Thanks for the nice converter anyway!
  
  Attached: patch-fig2pstricks_text_c.txt
  --- email ends here ---
  

• Change fprintf(fp,string) to fprintf(fp,"%s",string) to avoid possible compile-time warnings.

News (2011-02-04)

The web site is back.

News (2009-02-18)

Version 0.7.1 released.
A minor bugfix and feature enhancement

• Version number is fixed.
• Add "-12" and "-11" options, which insert "12pt" and "11pt" respectively to the document option.
• Add 'configure' which does nothing.
• Add 'make install' and 'make uninstall' to install the executables in /usr/local/bin.
• 'make DESTDIR=/usr install' works. But 'DESTDIR=/usr make install' does not.
• fig2epspdf is a bit cleaned up.
• Prebuilt MSDOS binary will not be provided in the future. You can build yours using MinGW. Install MinGW and compile it:
    PATH_TO_MINGW\bin\gcc -o fig2pstricks.exe *.c
  in the source directory.
  For example, I installed MinGW in my wine system and ran
    wine c:/mingw/bin/gcc -o fig2pstricks.exe *.c
  and fig2pstricks.exe was built.

What is fig2pstricks

Fig2pstricks converts a xfig or equivalently a fig file to pstricks. Current version works with FIG 3.2. I wrote it for my personal purpose of teaching econometrics. It's not bad to use it to process an xfig (or fig) file generated by the xfig() device of R.

Go to Freshmeat project page.

Example

Here is a sample R file which generates leastsq.fig file. Then the fig file is processed by fig2pstricks to produce leastsq.tex (command: fig2pstricks leastsq.fig -o leastsq.tex -c --prosper -d -T "A Simulation"). You can run 'latex leastsq' (twice if necessary), followed by 'dvips leastsq' and 'ps2pdf leastsq.ps'. Here is the resulting pdf file.

Screenshot

A screenshot for the pdf slide generated by R and fig2pstricks with Prosper is found here. The pdf file is here. The R source is here (with data from Ramanathan, Introductory Econometrics with Applications).

Documents

README, Changelog.

No manual page is available. (I have no time to write it.) But you can use "--help" (or "-h") option for help. Here is the output of fig2pstricks --help:

$ fig2pstricks --help
fig2pstricks: A fig to pstricks converter
Usage: fig2pstricks [options] [input_file]
Options:
    -o FILE           Set output file to FILE, default=stdout
    -c                Produce complete latex file
    -u UNIT           Specify unit, (default=1cm)
       or ux,uy       xunit is ux, yunit is uy (eg 1in,2.54cm)
                      use in, cm or mm (default=cm)
                      unit is unit*scale (cm)
    -s SCALE          Scale factor is SCALE (default=0.8)
       or sx,sy       x scale factor is sx, y scale factor is sy
                      unit is unit*scale (cm).
    -12               Add '12pt' in the document option.
                      effective only when used with -c.
    -11               Similar to -12 except that it adds '11pt'
    -p PADDING        Padding in fraction of unit (default=0.5)
    --prosper         Output with full Prosper support.
    -T title          Set the slide title to title in prosper.
                      Ignored in non-prosper mode
    -F format         Prosper style format (default=default).
                      One of frames, lignesbleues, azure, troispoints,
                      contemporain, nuancegris, darkblue, alien glow,
                      autumn, gyom, rico and default.
                      Ignored in non-prosper mode.
    -d, --use-dot     Convert ellipses to dots instead of ellipses
    -m, --math-label  Use math (enclosed by two $'s) for labels
    --empty           Append \thispagestyle{empty} when -c is enabled
                      This option is good for producing eps and pdf files
    --latex-symbols   Convert characters to latex commands
    --ignore-specials Ignore depth change specials
                      See --depth-help option.
    --depth-help      Help on bringing forward or sending backward objects.
    -v, --version     Show version
    -h, --help        Show this help

How to create nicely bounded eps and pdf for latex and pdflatex

Xfig (fig2dev) converts xfig files to eps and pdf format. (See man fig2dev.) But they don't take care of math symbols. We can use the --empty option to hide the page number so dvips, ps2epsi and epstopdf can create proper graphic files. This is sometimes handy. See the following example.

$ fig2pstricks -c --empty input.fig -o output.tex
  ### try scaling with the -s option
$ latex output
$ dvips output
$ ps2epsi output.ps output.eps
$ epstopdf output.eps

If you don't use the --empty option, then the created eps and pdf files will contain the page number as well, resulting in a strange graphic.

Copyright, excuses, porting

Fig2pstricks is released under GPL version 2.0. It may contain errors. Please do not expect any beauty in the program logic for I am just a novice amature programmer and I wrote this solely for my personal purpose.

There may be out there some good ones. But I had no time to search, and decided to write one myself.

It's written on Linux. I think no OS specific codes are included, so it should compile on other operating systems.