On 10/15/07, Greg Cunningham <greg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mon, 2007-10-15 at 18:10 +0100, Peter TB Brett wrote:
> On Monday 15 October 2007 17:27:43 Chris Albertson wrote:
> > Gschem's primary purpose is schematic capture. If what you want is
> > publication quality schematic drawings use XCircuit.
> > http://opencircuitdesign.com/xcircuit/.
>
> I'm afraid that this is just not true. It's entirely possible to
> produce "publication quality" (whatever that is) diagrams in gschem, and
> indeed I have done so, for reports etc. I admit that it is hard to do so
> using the standard symbol library -- but I have a separate library I drew for
> the purpose.
>
> I've also done some electrical diagrams for reports using Inkscape, which
> worked surprisingly well.
>
> Peter
...
I think Chris's angle is the font/symbol line 'quality' (can't think of
a better term) A good parallell is computer generated music scores.
Most MS free/cheap packages produce a technically correct score that is
awful for a musician to read. Lilypond OTOH, produces a score that is
*much* easier for a musician to read. It emulates the 19th century
score engraving craftmanship where score 'readability' reached it's
pinnacle.
Postscript is just so much better for defining symbols. Postscript is
a true "programming language". It features like loops and branching and
high end math (matrix multiply)
Much depends on your critiera for "quality". For example many people
are happy with the typesetting abilities of basic work processors like
Microsoft Word. But if you compare side by side to Don, Knuth's "tex"
there are differences.
There is a difference between how you draw on a computer screen
for schematic capture and how you should draw for publication in
print. I think it would be great if you could enter the schematic just
once and have the netlist converted for quality output just like you
can have it convertert for Spaic and PCB. Many you might have an
attribute "Postscript Symbol" These symbols can do intelegent functions
like allow fonts to be globally changed and test remain upright even if the
symbol is rotated.