Re: Electronic Circuit Drawing for High School Project

Andrew Sterian wrote:

> Your use of Xfig is a step in the right direction. I would encourage you
> to look into TGIF:
>
> http://bourbon.usc.edu:8001/tgif
>
> It does not drag wires around with parts, but it does have one very useful
> feature: you can embed LaTeX equations into figures and have them
> graphically rendered so you can see exactly how they show up. (Press
> Ctrl-i in the editor, or the Special->Instantiate menu, then select
> eq4.sym, right-click on the newly-instantiated object, select "Edit
> attribute in editor-->eq=" and enter your equation...then exit the editor,
> double-click on the object and the equation will render. Press Alt-Cntrl-h
> (or Special->Attributes->Hide Attributes) and the LaTeX source is hidden).

Tgif is a very nice program. Thank you for this hint. And especially for the
manual how to write a first equation with tgif! Usually, these things take
time if you have to find it out by yourself.

I tried to convert the output to PDF. The formulas, looking ugly in the
tgif-editor, are just as I want them in the PDF! Perfect. Just one little
drawback, perhaps you could help me? The PDF has the size of an A4-Page,
and not just the size of the circuit I draw. If I would include that in
LaTeX as a figure, the circuit would be a small part only of the figure,
and the whole rest would be white. Is there a way to change this behavior?

> There are some publicly-available libraries of electronic part symbols for
> use with TGIF. I didn't really like them, and they weren't complete, so I
> started drawing my own. I can mail them to you if you decide to use TGIF.

I guess you use standard US symbols, whereas I am going to use the european
ones. But nevertheless, I am very interested, and if it's only to learn!

Yours,

Bernhard
.