🚀 go-pugleaf

Up until a few days ago I would not have been qualified to comment on
PICTeX, but I recently did wuite a bit of discovery work with it, and
have concluded that it is quite capable, but has severe implementation
limits.

PICTeX's input syntax is good, and its drawing capabilities are very
nice. You can obtain PICTeX and learn how to use it, and its limitations
relatively cheaply (~$35 for the manual, macros are free). Learning is
quick.

On the other hand, you will find it difficult to obtain the results you desire
unless you have a good screen previewer. I work on the Mac (Textures),
so this is no problem for me.

The significant implementation limit of PICTeX has to do with the fact that
it renders all of the lines and curves as lots of little dots, so you can
easily overflow TeX's box memory with the vast number of boxes in your
plots.

In sum, PICTeX is not very popular because of the stiff implementation
dependency.

However, I am presently working on a reimplementation of the drawing
layer of PICTeX that will lift these limits as long as you are using
a PostScript printer as your output device. To obtain a screen preview,
you would have to use something like GhostScript. A likely as not,
even my solution is probably not going to relieve PICTeX's drawbacks
(from your point of view), but let me know if you're interested in
my work.

In the larger context, PICTeX is attractive because it's cheap, but
the most valuable tool is one in which you progam the hard parts, and
then visually edit the result to perfection. My modified PICTeX is
meant to result in Adobe Illustrator EPS files (which are editable),
so it comes close to this ideal. But there's no getting around the
considerable price of a program like Adobe Illustrator or whatever.

So if you want something that is capable and easy-to-use and produces
fine output, you'll ultimately have to pruchase commercial software.
If you'll settle for less, the LaTeX picture environment, and PICTeX
are about the best I can think of.

By the way, I suggest that using Frame Maker as a drawing vehicle
is a disastrous choice if you intend to use the results within
another program, like LaTeX. Frame still hasn't figured out how to
write good EPS code, so you'll be able to generate the illustrations,
but once you do, you'll have a headache on your hands.

I'm curious how other subscribers regard the further issues I've
brought up, so I'm posting this back to info-tex.

Art