Credits

Xfig was originally written by Supoj Sutanthavibul at the University of Texas at Austin in 1985 for SunView. Later, Ken Yap, at Rochester, New York, did the first port of xfig to X11. In 1989, Brian V. Smith picked it up and added features such as multiple fonts, line thickness, area fill etc. Around 1991, Paul King at the University of Queensland, Australia added many features and overhauled the look and feel of xfig for version 2.0, to produce essentially what you see today. In 1992, Brian Boyter added the ability to import EPS files, and later it was expanded to import several other bitmap formats as well. Mr. Tom Sato from Japan added the Japanese text support and the spell checker and search/replace feature in 1997. He has added several other features mentioned in the New Features section and fixed several Bugs.

Thomas Loimer is the main contact for xfig and its incorporation of new features written either by himself or others.

There have been dozens of people who have contributed to the success (and code) of xfig, and they are too numerous to mention here. The man pages list some of those people. See below for the major copyrights.

Copyright/Permission Notices

This Documentation

This documentation was first written in Japanese by Tom Sato, based on the manual pages distributed with xfig. It was then translated into English with the help of some kind people. Later, it was updated to conform to the latest version by Brian Smith.

Permission to use, copy and distribute this documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted. Modification of this documentation is also granted as long as this copyright/permission notice remain intact and name of the person who made the modification is explicitly written in the documentation. However, contact with Tom Sato and/or Brian V. Smith is strongly recommended if you want to distribute modified version of this documentation.

Xfig

Original Copyright (c) 1985 by Supoj Sutanthavibul
Parts Copyright (c) 1989-2015 by Brian V. Smith
Parts Copyright (c) 1991 by Paul King
Parts Copyright (c) 2016-2024 by Thomas Loimer
Other Copyrights may be found in various files
Main Xfig copyright notice:
Any party obtaining a copy of these files is granted, free of charge, a full and unrestricted irrevocable, world-wide, paid up, royalty-free, nonexclusive right and license to deal in this software and documentation files (the "Software"), including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish and/or distribute copies of the Software, and to permit persons who receive copies from any such party to do so, with the only requirement being that this copyright notice remain intact.
No representations are made about the suitability of this software for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.
Parts Copyright (C) 1993 by Alan Richardson (mppa3@uk.ac.sussex.syma)
The text rotation code in w_rottext.c was written by Alan Richardson. The above copyright notice holds for this work as well.
Parts Copyright (c) 1994 by Anthony Dekker
The Kohonen neural network code for color optimization was written by Anthony Dekker.
Parts Copyright (c) 1995 by C. Blanc and C. Schlick
The X-Spline code was written Carole Blanc (blanc@labri.u-bordeaux.fr) and Christophe Schlick (schlick@labri.u-bordeaux.fr) starting from an initial implementation done by C. Feuille, S. Grosbois, L. Maziere and L. Minihot as a student practice (Universite Bordeaux, France). For additional information about X-splines, see:
"X-Splines: A Spline Model Designed for the End User" by C. Blanc and C. Schlick, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH'95 http://dept-info.labri.u-bordeaux.fr/~schlick/DOC/sig1.html

About GIF Support

Because Unisys has stated that they WILL charge royalties for the use of the LZW compression algorithm even in FREE programs, I have removed all traces of the GIF LZW compression/decompression code from xfig. Xfig now calls giftopnm and ppmtopcx to import GIF files. Screen capture writes a PNG file. Exporting is handled by calling the ppmtogif program from fig2dev.

Contact

Please send any questions, bug fixes, contributions and any comments to following destinations. When reporting a bug, please first check if the problem is mentioned in the FAQ section of the HTML files (xfig Help menu).

If it is not mentioned there, be sure to report the operating system you are using (e.g. SunOS 4.1.3), type of X server and version (OpenWindows 3, X11R6.4, XFree86 3.2.2, etc) and color depth (e.g. 8bpp, 16bpp), and most importantly the version of xfig or fig2dev that is having the problem.

It is also VERY useful to me if you can provide a stack trace from a debugger such as gdb, dbx, ups, etc.

About this manual or xfig and TransFig themselves (except Japanese support facility): --- thomas.loimer@tuwien.ac.at (Thomas Loimer)
About Japanese support facility: --- VEF00200@nifty.ne.jp (Tom Sato)

Japanese users can also send questions about xfig or TransFig to VEF00200@nifty.ne.jp.

[ Contents | Introduction | Credits ]