Interest in xfig

[Telford Tendys <telford@eng.uts.edu.au>]

As a longtime LaTeX user I am also a longtime xfig user (actually going back
to fig, if anyone remembers before X). So it often irritates me to have to
visit the edit box again and again using the slow and tedious graphical user
interface (OK, the GUI is good for drawing, good for pick and place, etc but
a CLI kicks the backside off a GUI when it comes to editing parameters, especially
xfigs slow popups and lack of keyboard movement around the form).

I figure that some scripting is what is needed so I had a go at patching
in libguile. So far I have managed the following:

* Have built a little edit-box for scheme source that has an eval button.
  eval results pop up in a small box at the bottom (possibly they should
  go into xfig's message window which allows scrolling, possibly they
  should go both places).

* Patch for the help menu to have an option that pops the above edit-box.
  Well, OK the help menu is a dumb place but the xfig screen is already so
  cluttered is seemed like the only place available.

* Some really basic `search for point' and `search for object' operations
  available as scheme functions.

This is really only a starting point but the next step is to make xfig's
drawing objects into SMOBs and that is a big job. Also that has some
intrinsic problems because xfig can delete its drawing objects from the
drawing at any time so I will have to modify the deletion operation
to check is guile is keeping a reference to the object. If it is then
there will need to be a mechanism for tagging the object as unlinked from
xfig but still referenced by guile. I can't copy the objects into guile either
because about the only unique way to keep hold of an xfig object is to
keep its pointer. I'll think about these issues some other day.

Does anyone else use xfig? Would this be something worth persuing in
a more serious manner?

	- Tel