Re: ePiX GUI

[Jay Belanger <belanger@truman.edu>]

"Andrew D. Hwang" <ahwang@mathcs.holycross.edu> writes:

> A few people (mostly Windows users, if it matters) 

So, is ePiX running on Windows these days?  With cygwin, perhaps?

> have mentioned the
> desirability of a graphical interface to ePiX. While a GUI is premature
> (until the new version of the library is stable), and I don't see myself
> using one regularly (to me, a mouse is a barbaric tool of wrist injury
> and a poor substitute for the TAB key:), 

The first, and most important, design decision should be to make the
mouse ineffectual, or perhaps a mouse-click could pop up a dialog box
saying "Use the keyboard".

> I'm sympathetic to the desire for
> one. Do any of you have ideas/opinions on:

I have no worthwhile opinions, since I wouldn't use a GUI for ePiX.
At first I thought the idea a bit odd, since ePiX is already a
frontend for eepic; why put a frontend on a frontend?  Why not make a
front end directly for eepic, for example?  But I suppose the code
could be tweaked after the GUI created it, so the intermediate code
could be important.  
My next thought was that xfig has one of the nicer picture drawing
interfaces.  Why not use that, and have a fig2epix translator?  Xfig
isn't that portable, I suppose, hence the "X", but there are jfig
(xfig in java, I think) and tkpaint that (I think) output in fig.
But I suppose these wouldn't take very full advantage of ePiX.
I think that a GUI for ePiX would have to use a lot of dialog boxes:
to accurately plot the graph of a function, I would think you'd need
to give the program a formula for the function.  For overall
mathematical accuracy, I would think you'd need to tell the program
most information rather than show it (although things like snap to
grid would help), so I would expect a lot of dialog boxes.

Hmm.  Those are my thoughts.

Jay