In the event that adjustments to the final figure are required, the
Graphical User Interface (GUI) xasy
included with
Asymptote
allows you to move graphical objects around with mouse Button-1
.
To use xasy
, one must first deconstruct Asymptote
pictures into transparent GIF images with the command
asy -xN
, where N
denotes the magnification (a positive
real number, say 2). The command asy -VxN
automatically invokes
xasy
once deconstruction is complete. Alternatively, one may
turn on the -xN
option in interactive mode or from within a module
using the function gui()
or gui(N)
. One can turn GUI
mode off again with gui(0)
.
Deconstruction requires that the ImageMagick
convert
utility be installed.
The modified layout can be written to disk with the w
key in a form
readable to Asymptote
.
A wheel mouse is convenient for raising and lowering objects, to expose
the object to be moved. If a wheel mouse is not available, mouse
Button-2
(lower) can be used repeatedly instead. Here are the
currently defined key mappings:
z
r
<Delete>
w
q
One can also draw connected line segments by holding down the shift key
and pressing mouse Button-1
at each desired node. Releasing the shift
key ends the definition of the path. More features will be added to
this preliminary GUI soon.
As xasy
is written in the interactive scripting language
Python/TK
, it requires that both Python
and the
tkinter
package be installed (included with Python
under
MSDOS
). Under Fedora Core 4
, you can either install
tkinter
with the command
yum install tkinteror manually install the individual packages:
rpm -i tkinter-2.4.1-2.i386.rpm rpm -U --nodeps tix-8.1.4-100.i386.rpm rpm -U --nodeps tk-8.4.9-3.i386.rpm
Deconstruction of compound objects (such as arrows) can be prevented by enclosing them within the commands
void begingroup(picture pic=currentpicture); void endgroup(picture pic=currentpicture);By default, the elements of a picture or frame will be grouped together on adding them to a picture. However, the elements of a frame added to another frame are not grouped together by default: their elements will be individually deconstructed (see add).