Lastest news:

12.11.2007 Uploaded a new jfig bundle for Mac OS X 10.5, contributed by Frank Stengel.

11.10.2007 Just an empty news item to show that jfig is still maintained... because several people have recently asked about the status. Of course, there is a growing wishlist with planned new features, but little time for active development right now.

07.09.2006: Finally integrated support for the mixed pstex/pstex_t export via fig2dev to the jfig user-interface. Just open the export options dialog via the menu (menu > export > export options...), then select the pstex+pstex_t output language. Note that fig2dev always uses a magnification of 100% (i.e., original size) for the pstex/pstex_t export. If necessary, mark all objects and use the jfig scale command to change the figure size before exporting. Also note that TeX/LaTeX will ignore non-zero rotation angles for rotated texts. As always, please report bugs and suggest fixes.

03.08.2006: just got a report that our Mac OS X version of fig2dev won't run on the new Intel-based Macs... Updates, anyone?

09.06.2006: fix scale command to handle horizontal and vertical lines.

26.03.2006: don't write illegal file headers when user specifies jfig.units=millimeters.

14.03.2006: fix jar packaging to actually include the Array/MHG plotting classes.

27.02.2006: fix visibility of TeX-mode texts when using layer-manager.

24.10.2005: uploaded the jfig-bundle for Mac OS X contributed by Frank Stengel. The bundle includes jfig3-itext.jar, the fig2dev converter and applescript code for desktop integration. For example, clicking a .fig file will open jfig, etc. See the download page for details.

17.10.2005: uploaded jfig version 3.03. This should fix the line-style bug from 3.02, as well as some parser and x-spline issues. Please upgrade and report any new bugs that might have crept in.

09.08.2005: new web-page about customizing jfig. Describes simple animation, scripting, and includes and explains a model-railroad track editor as an example.

01.08.2005: several minor fixes: support global FIG file comments, user-defined default arrow size, handle TeX-mode default font, ignore trailing spaces in property files, improved create-bullet-point command.

25.05.2005: add case-insensitive font-name lookup for iText PDF export; this should get TeX-mode export working on Mac OS X systems. Also minor website fixes.

13.05.2005: jfig3 has just been released! The new version is available via our Java Webstart page or for manual download from the download page. While the user-interface looks very similar to the previous version (jfig 2.x), there have been many changes under the hood. Therefore, the new version might still considered experimental for now. Please report all bugs that you find and don't hesitate to ask for new features and improvements.

Please take a look at the list of the most important changes:

• much better rendering quality when anti-aliasing is enabled
• much better rendering for arrows (especially on thick lines)
• much faster rendering for nested compound objects due to on-flight bounding-box tests
• assumes 72dpi instead of 75dpi screen resolution (font size should match fig2dev now)
• many GUI usability fixes, including a few new icons, better dialog window handling
• support for 'compose characters' (unicode, latin-1, symbols)
• new 'add/remove arrow' command, improved 'change object type' command
• improved rotation controls (text, ellipse, rotate command)
• option to delete unused user-defined colors
• recursive undo and redo should work for all editing commands now

• bitmap-image export now based on javax.imageio
• JPG, PNG, and PPM formats supported (JDK/JRE 1.4 or higher)
• bitmap-image exporting uses figure bounding box now
• new GUI to select magnification, anti-aliasing, interpolation, border
• completely rewritten print functions based on javax.print
• the print dialog now remembers paper and format settings
• jfig3-itext.jar already includes the iText PDF library, no extra setup required
• fig2dev export now uses temporary files (previously, the last saved version of the file would be exported).
• batch-mode export options via command-line options to jfig3

• all coordinates now kept in double-precision internally
• refactoring throughout the jfig.objects and jfig.java2d classes
• objects only keep the geometry now, rendering deferred to jfig.java2d
• parser reports correct line-numbers on input file errors
• new class JFigViewerApplet based on JFigViewerBean
• many fixes and new functions in MHG (plotting)

Older news:

26/01/05: a few minor fixes, see doc/CHANGES for a full list. Also a major update to TeX-mode rendering, including the option to use 'word boxes' instead of 'char boxes' to enable kerning and better itext PDF export. Also fixed font management to re-enable Computer Modern fonts for JDK/JRE 1.5.x.

23/06/04: the 'create arc' command now allows to specify the arc center. Also fixed an integer overflow in 'create dimensioning' for very long lines.

05/01/04: New FIG viewer packaged as a Java Bean component. This class allows to embed FIG drawings into your own applications very easily. Please see the bean docs for details. Several cleanups and minor fixes. Finally uploaded an up-to-date classdoc archive.

20/11/03: Support for native PDF export via the iText class library. Also, TeX-mode now uses the Computer Modern fonts which looks much better and means that font embedding is possible during Postscript and PDF export.

27/10/02: Finally got a Swing-version of jfig ready for download. If you are running JDK 1.3.1 or later, download and try the jfig2.jar archive. The new version uses Swing-based components for the user-interface, including the main object canvas and all dialog windows. As a result, the GUI looks much better, nested dialogs and tooltips should work, the "select library object" dialogs uses a browser tree, the editor can be embedded easily into Swing projects, etc.

History

Despite the major performance problems of early Java virtual machines, the option to run jfig on both my Solaris workstation and my Windows notebook soon made me use jfig instead of my previous favorite graphics editor (namely, xfig). Back then, Powerpoint would crash regularly on any presentation with more than 20 or 30 slides. As a workaround, I wrote the PresentationViewer class and started to prepare my lecture slides with jfig, too: not a single crash, yet :-)

Over the years, I kept adding features to jfig whenever I needed them, the biggest one being the conversion to Swing and Java2D in 2002. Enjoy!