Questions[vector-drawings](ubuntu)

I'm starting to learn radio. That's as in "Radio Rangers" -- crystal sets, to start, then moving up to tubes, and likely staying at that era (I don't have any real interest in transistors). This may go as far as getting an Amateur license.

In order to document my "as built" work, I need to be able to draw a circuit diagram, and in order for it to be neat enough to publish on the Web, I'd like to use my computer to do the drawing. I specifically need to be able to include symbols for tubes with various numbers of grids and other internal parts (beam power elements, for instance), beyond the usual resistors, capacitors, coils, and so forth.

Twenty years ago, I'd have used GeoWorks Ensemble's GeoDraw -- an object drawing tool that ran well on a 386 with 2-4 MB RAM. The current version, however, seems a little retro for a multi-core, multi-gigahertz, multi-gigabyte system. I'm noddingly familiar with Inkscape, but find it more complicated to use (in truth, I had trouble just drawing lines and circles last time I tried it).

I know my way around GIMP to some extent, but it's a bitmap editor at heart; it doesn't really handle objects.

What I really need is software that's as easy to use as GeoDraw -- including, if the symbols aren't included or downloadable, the ability to create symbols that can be pasted, rather than having to be drawn over and over. It should do "object drawing", with no loss of resolution as a drawing is scaled larger or smaller. Ideally, it should be free and open source.

So far, the answers all seem to point to software packages with circuit simulation, which require having a model for every component, or the simulation doesn't work -- unfortunately, the SPICE models that are required are scattered far and wide and very, very few of them are for vacuum tubes, meaning I'd have to create my own model data for components that, in most cases, haven't been made in thirty or forty years.

Further, I genuinely don't want to deal with the learning curve of a circuit simulation at this time. I'm starting from known working circuits, making minor mods (different tube models, running on different filament or plate voltage, for instance, or a pentode in place of a triode). I just need software that will let me draw and print a vector/object circuit diagram, something like a simplified Inkscape with electronic symbol library.

I'm currently using Ubuntu 16.04 Mate -- but of course I'd prefer to be able to keep the same drawing software past future upgrades.

When I print on A3 or A4 paper looks pixelated, the same for the text manipulation. I use to save designs to .pdf or .tiff and then I open them on Illustrator and modify things, but I don´t want to do that. I love Gimp! I know it´s not a 100% ubuntu question but I guess some ubuntu graphic designers on Linux will have experienced this problem. Thanks!

I want to make some workflow graphics. Is there a convenient tool for that?

I found some Git workflow diagrams in Vincent Driessen's Successful Git branching model and Jussi Judin's blog post in response. I'll paste in just a small chunk of Driessen's drawing here to give you an idea what I'm looking for:

I want to create new lovely "cartoonish" drawings of that sort for a project report. I like that they have somewhat "fuzzy" text boxes, pleasant callout shapes with configurable pointers to dots, and colored dots. I wish the editor would make it convenient to re-align pieces. It would be nice if arrows might "move with the dots" to which they point in an "easy" to adjust way.

Can you tell me how it can be done in Ubuntu? I'm aware of dia, which makes less jazzy illustrations.

Please don't say I need a Microsoft Surface to do this :)

I have a PDF, made with Inkscape, that uses transparent colors. This image shall be used in a LaTeX document.

While preserving the transparency is nice for editing, it can be a problem for printing. Printing usually involves PDF to PS conversion. Since Postscript does not support transparency, this requires either

• flatting, i.e. creating a vector graphic that works without transparency

or

• rastering, i.e. rendering a bitmap image.

When a PDF document containing such a figure is printed (or converted to PS) using Evince (or Cairo or Ghostscript), the whole page gets rendered as a bitmap, rendering fonts ugly (different from other pages). (Adobe Acrobat handles such PDFs well.)

Unfortunately, converting the PDF figures to EPS (before including them with LaTeX) doesn't help much, because both pdftops and pdf2ps (again, Cairo or Ghostscript) rasterize the image, i.e. render a bitmap (saved as EPS). (This is slightly better, because it doesn't affect the whole page, but I'd still prefer a vector graphics.)

How can I flatten transparency with Inkscape or other software on Linux?

Does anybody know of software that can batch convert .ai into another format? Preferably png or pdf?