Introduction to the Figure Package

Introduction to the Package figPac

This package provides a library of Java routines for drawing figures to screen and/or to PostScript. A figure is to be thought of as a sequence of figure elements. Technically, a figure element is any instance of any class that implements the interface fElement. I use the convention that these classes all have names starting with a lower case f (standing for figure) followed by a capital letter. Most figure elements will be lines, polygons, arcs and so on. I have provided classes for the following standard figure elements.

fArrow: Draws an arrow.
fArrowhead: Draws an arrowhead.
fAxes: Draws the x and y axes, puts ticks on the axes, gives the coordinate values corresponding to the ticks and puts labels on the axes.
fBezier: Draws and/or fills a smooth curve through a given sequence of points.
fCurve: Draws and/or fills a curve given by a formula.
fDisk: Draws and/or fills a circular or elliptical disk.
fEllipticalArc: Draws a circular or elliptical arc.
fLabel: Prints a label.
fLine: Draws a line segment.
fParticleLine: Draws a Feynman diagram particle line.
fPolygon: Draws and/or fills a polygon.
fResistor: Draws a sawtooth line.
fSquiggle: Draws a squiggly line.
fTeXlabel: Creates a label that may be used within a TeX file.

There is a second class of fElements for modifying the drawing environment and the coordinate system.

fEnv: Used to change the drawing environment. That is, to change fonts, colours and so on.
fRotate: Used to rotate the coordinate system.
fScale: Used to scale the coordinate system.
fTranslate: Used to translate the coordinate system.

Finally, there is the special fElement

fSubFigure: Creates a subfigure, which itself consists of a sequence of fElements. It is designed to allow recursive use, so that you can have subfigures of subfigures of subfigures and so on.

More introductory material is provided in

Creating figures. [Introduction | Figure]
- Creating figures using the figPac Template.
- Creating figures using the (point and click GUI) figEdit.
Coordinate systems.
The drawing environment. [Introduction | fEnv]
Creating new classes of figure elements. [Introduction | fElement]
Variables.
Using figPac figures in TeX documents

and a number of examples are provided in

Example yielding a screen image [code | execute]
Sample code yielding a PostScript file.
Sample code that yields a PostScript file when run as an application and that yields a screen image when run as an applet.
Example in which a figure responds to keypresses [code | execute]

I have done a couple of things to reduce the number of keystrokes required in the preparation of Figures. One is prepare a "template" class called Template that has built in typical methods for displaying figures to screen and to Postscript file as well as a number of "shortform" methods and variables. See

[Introduction | Template]
Template example [code | execute]

Another is to create a crude "point and click" interface to figPac named figEdit.