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## picture environment

has a built-in environment for describing pictures to be included into documents. Unfortunately, the mechanics of entering such a picture are quite clumsy, involving a lot of coördinates and slopes, but fig provides a way of automatically creating such a file. Suppose you want to include a diagram (say the root system of SO(5)) in a document. Use fig to create the appropriate diagram and save the result in a file called, say, rootso5.fig. Remember to select the option on the fig screen so that fig will not permit you to draw lines that cannot produce.

You will need to choose the right file format from the Export menu. to create a file called rootso5.tex with the appropriate diagram encoded in a form that will understand. Note that this file cannot be reloaded into xfig, so save an xfig version too. When you get to the appropriate point in your document, include the following sequence of commands:

\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\end{center}
\caption{The Root System of $SO(5)$}
\end{figure}

Figure 1: The Root System of SO(5)

This will produce a figure, suitably centered and labeled, at a reasonable'' place in your document. (See the User's Guide for details on what is considered to be reasonable''.) Although this procedure is evidently quite straightforward, there are some problems with it. The easiest problem to rectify is that the xfig program is rather stubborn about printing only in ordinary Roman font. If you would like something more interesting (say to label the roots with appropriate 's and 's) then the easiest thing to do is to put appropriate labels in Roman font in the original picture using xfig. After you run fig2dev , you can edit the document and substitute Greek letters for the Latin equivalents.

The more difficult problem is that itself is not equipped to handle very complicated pictures. It will print circles only of particular radii and lines and vectors of particular slopes. To do anything more complex, such as curved lines, you will need to export from xfig to either eepic or PostScript.

Next: eepic picture environment Up: Including Pictures Previous: Xfig

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