Fig4TeX A few commented examples

Fig4TeX : Practical issues for beginners

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How to begin : Users are encouraged to read at least the beginning of the PDF documentation in order to get started with the main (elementary) concepts of this macro package. The Tutorial section contains some examples that can be copied-pasted and used as a starting point. Several other examples can be found in the Examples section.
Where to copy this macro package : In order to have Fig4TeX found during the compilation of the document, people often copy the files in the same directory as the document. This is clearly not a good solution when several documents in different locations refer to the same macro file, because, in this case, the macro file is generally duplicated in each of these different locations to make the compilation work. Indeed, only one copy of the macro file is needed. This can be achieved at least in two ways:
- Copy the two files (fig4tex.sty and fig4tex.tex) under the installation directory of TeX on your computer and rebuild the path search database (texhash command) ; you may need your system administrator to do that.
- Copy the two files (fig4tex.sty and fig4tex.tex) in some particular directory depending on the operating system or the typesetting software you use ; you can do this yourself.
  In the latter case, on UNIX systems (including Linux and Mac OS X), to make things work from command line (in a terminal window), the best is to copy the files in the directory $HOME/texmf/tex (or $HOME/Library/texmf/tex under Mac OS X), since this directory is scanned by the TeX path search system ($HOME denotes your own home directory). You will have to create this directory if it does not exist.
  Alternatively, you can set the TEXINPUTS environment variable. More precisely, assuming you have copied the two files in the directory $HOME/SomeTexDir, you just have to add the following line
  
       setenv TEXINPUTS .:$HOME/SomeTexDir:
  
  in your $HOME/.cshrc file if you use C-shell or T-shell, or add the following lines
  
       TEXINPUTS=.:$HOME/SomeTexDir:
       export TEXINPUTS
  
  in your $HOME/.profile file if you use Bourne-shell or similar, like Bash (Bash also scans $HOME/.bash_profile).
  This modification will be taken into account on next login.
Final document : The original tex or latex typesetting commands produce a DVI file which in turn can be processed by dvips to obtain a PostScript file, or dvipdf to obtain a PDF file. This is called the DVI mode. The newer pdftex or pdflatex typesetting commands produce a PDF file without the DVI step. This is called the PDF mode and is now the default mode in most of the TeX distributions.
Fig4TeX takes care automatically of which mode is used, so that the user has usually not to bother with this feature. However, one must be aware of the following fact concerning file inclusion : pdftex ignores the PostScript files that are included in the document (except those created by MetaPost).
As a consequence, in order to include a PostScript file, either use DVI mode or convert the file into PDF. In PDF mode, JBIG2, JPEG, PDF and PNG files can be included.
Figure update : The simplest way to use this macro package is to give no file name as argument to \figdrawbegin. In this case, a default file is used to store the graphical instructions, which is always updated.
If a file name is given as argument to \figdrawbegin, when the geometry of the figure is modified, the modifications are taken into account during the next compilation only if the corresponding graphical file has been removed, or, which is more convenient, if the 'update mode' is switched on. This can be done locally, for a particular figure, by \figset, or globally for the whole document, by \figsetdefault. See these macros for more information (keyword 'update') or the section Drawing the figure in the PDF documentation.
Insertion of a figure in a document : See here.