Wanted: schematic processor
Rick Nelson, Senior Technical Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 3/1/2001
It’s a truism that the computer has revolutionized publishing over the last 20 years. You can send me text in virtually any word-processing format and in any of hundreds of fonts. Here, I can convert it for publication without retyping it. If you’re eccentric, you can even, ee cummings-like, submit all lowercase copy:
divide v1 by 10kv to get i1.
With a few mouse clicks (and a guess that the 10k refers to impedance, not angular momentum), I can convert it to our magazine’s style, adding such flourishes as italic fonts and subscripting for variables:
Divide v1 by 10 kW to get i1.
I can even convert longhand submissions using optical character recognition. (For the record, your chances of becoming a successful Test & Measurement World author are greatly diminished if you choose an eccentric format, but there are no insurmountable technical barriers to our making use of it.)
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The last 20 years, however, haven’t done for graphics portability what they have done for text portability. To accompany the above statements, you might submit the schematic diagram a. It’s clear and unambiguous, but we want to maintain a consistent graphics style throughout the magazine, so we will render your drawing as shown in b. Unfortunately, we can’t open your graphics file and substitute our preferred resistor and ground symbols and text fonts. We invariably redraw submitted diagrams from scratch.
The problem of figure portability seems intractable. The only format our art and production people can work with is Adobe Illustrator, which is very expensive and, I understand, difficult to learn. I don’t have a copy of it; here, only the artists and production editors get it. If I want to get a drawing into print, I create it by hand, in Microsoft Word, or using an old copy of Corel Draw 3. Then, I give a hardcopy to our art director, who has to have it redrawn in Illustrator.
What’s needed is a standard, portable drawing format that would let drawings be created and edited by people using different programs—created using engineering packages like Autosketch, Visio, or the schematic-capture utilities that come with circuit simulators, and edited using art packages like Illustrator. It hasn’t happened yet, so we’re stuck with a time-consuming and error-prone method of getting schematics into print. T&MW
