xfig for DEBIAN =============== For additional information about xfig have a look at the xfig web page at http://www-epb.lbl.gov/xfig/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/mcj/ Japanese Support ================ Simply set the environment variable LANG to ja_JP.ujis and xfig should be hopefully adapted to your needs. I cannot test this out here, because I don't understand any Japanese nor am I able to understand the fonts, so if the Japanese adaptions don't work as they should, please let me know. Korean Support ============== Should work in the same way like Japanese support does but with LANG set to ko_KR.eucKR. UTF-8 Support ============= xfig and transfig lack UTF-8 support, so if you have a UTF-8 locale set as LC_CTYPE (see locale(1)), you will not be able to enter characters other then 7bit ASCII via keyboard (using "View" -> "Character map" may work). To work around this issue, there is a wrapper around xfig installed, that tries to downgrade you LC_CTYPE to a non-UTF-8 charset, which may or may not work. To work around this automatism, you can define an environment variable XFIG_LC_CTYPE and set it to some non-UTF-8 value like "de_DE". Make sure, that you have build this ("locale -a" shows all generated locales on your system and "dpkg-reconfigure locales" allows one to extend the list of generated locales). Xaw vs. Xaw3D ============= xfig can be compiled with Xaw (2D look) as well as with Xaw3D (3D look). Xaw3D is designed as a plug-in-replacement for Xaw, so every program compiled with Xaw should be able to run with Xaw3D. That's the theory, while in reality the compatibility isn't perfect. That means, that xfig (since version 3.2.3) compiled with Xaw does not run with Xaw3D ("xfig: Symbol `smeBSBClassRec' has different size in shared object, consider re-linking"). So I had to decide between generally using 2D look (also for users who have Xaw3D installed) by using xaw-wrappers and denying Xaw3D or alternatively to generally use Xaw3D (and depend on xaw3dg) as recommended by the upstream author. I choose the latter option, so xfig is now linked against xaw3dg. pstex ===== It's not a xfig but a transfig issue, but there are many people heaving problems with the pstex driver. The problem is, that newer versions of transfig need \usepackage{color} to work with pstex. So simply add \usepackage{graphicx} and \usepackage{color} to your LaTeX file before using pstex and everything should work correct. Cursor theme ============ You may notice some problems with ugly cursors which don't allow you to do precise drawings. This usually depends on the configured cursor theme. If you don't like the configure cursor font, have a look at the output of update-alternatives --display x-cursor-theme This lists all installed cursor theme with their priorities and shows which of these alternatives is currently linked. There were problems with the gtk2-engines-industrial theme reported, which replaces the cross hair cursor by a big white cross. To change the cursor theme run update-alternatives --config x-cursor-theme and select the core.theme. After this you may have to restart you X server. Roland Rosenfeld