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List:       koffice
Subject:    Problems with kontour drawing and eps output
From:       Praedor Tempus <praedor () yahoo ! com>
Date:       2002-03-18 15:22:43
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I am in desperate need of a vector graphics drawing app in linux.  Thus far, 
NONE of the apps I've tried have proven adequate.  Kontour comes real close 
but there appears to be a problem with how it exports eps images. 
  I need a vector graphic app that produces output suitable for publication 
in professional scientific journals.  The problems that I have with kontour 
in this regard are twofold:
1.  Moving graphic components like boxes, lines, etc is jerky instead of 
smooth, even with "snap to grid" NOT selected.  The alignment tools do not 
contain the subtlety to manage much of what I need.  I draw a set of boxes 
and a line.  I need the boxes to be placed with different sides flush with 
with different sides of other boxes and for them all to sit nicely upon a 
line.  I find I am able to use the alignment tool to handle a large part of 
this but some of it simply requires that I manually move this or that graphic 
item by hand/mouse.  This is where the problem arises.  Instead of a nice, 
smooth movement, the movement is stair-stepped and jerky and almost 
invariably leads to overlapping graphics - it is often impossible to manually 
move any line or box (in this case) so that they are adjacent/flush with each 
other.  They always want to instead partially overlap.

2. More problematic than number 1 is the output, as eps, of any graphic I 
successfully create.  Since I am needing to publish to professional journals 
there are really strict requirements for their quality.  What kontour does is 
output a nice-looking eps graphic BUT it contains a large amount of 
whitespace, even when I set the page-size to be barely large enough to hold 
the graphic.  I have to use Lyx for writing my publication-quality (citations 
and references - only Lyx can do this) and invariably, if I try to insert my 
eps graphic into a Lyx document, the result is 3 pages added to the document, 
one with the graphic and two of nothing but whitespace.  If I open the eps in 
Gimp, first, the eps quality goes down the toilet (Gimp REALLY sucks for 
high-quality eps output) and the image opens up, sure enough, as a graphic 
with a lot of whitespace around it.  I try to crop it down to minimum size 
needed and then save it but doing this leads to what was once a nice-looking 
graphic becoming Gimp-ugly-as-Hell (blocky, lines missing/not rendered) no 
matter what I do with antialiasing and quality settings.  The BEST option, 
then, would appear to be being able to go directly from kontour to eps if I 
want high-quality output but the whitespace problem is a killer.

  I can attach my kontour file graphic and send it to anyone who wants to try 
to see the problem/fix the problem (if you look at the eps output in 
kghostview or gv you will see the graphic stuck right up there in the top 
left corner of a large whitespace page).  I am about to reinstall StarOffice 
or OpenOffice again so I can have use of its drawing app in hopes that IT 
will produce acceptable/submittable/publishable eps but this should not be 
necessary.

praedor
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