David Fletcher

Things are going well with getting the elliptical arcs integrated. Several fig2dev conversions for export are now working (ps/eps/pdf, svg, Latex pict2e format). Tikz format is not viable as it does not have its own elliptic arc representation so without converting to some type of spline or using additional external packages it won't work. The main sticking point is the file format and making sure that this doesn't break anything. Here are some notes on things that don't work, followed lower down...

Screenshot attached illustrating the current status.

I think the file format change could be why this stalled previously. I'll take a look and see if the information can be squeezed in without adding the additional digit to the line. Currently the elliptic arc 'falls back' to being plotted as a circular arc if the file is read by software that doesn't understand elliptic arcs in the FIG format. That depends on the software reading the file without worrying about the extra digit stored. I guess by squeezing in the data to the same string format as a...

Back in 2001 I wrote a patch for xfig 3.2.3d to give Xfig the capability to draw elliptical arcs. I emailed it to Brian V. Smith and I think we might have exchanged a couple of emails. I've used my patched version since then but the elliptical arcs didn't appear in the release version. Recently I was looking at the Xfig sources and realised there's elements of my patch in there, and in docs/TODO elliptical arcs are listed as a future item for version 4. Elliptical arcs need a file format change to...