FRITS - an electronical symbols library for Xfig

About FRITS

FRITS is a library for the excellent vector graphics drawing program Xfig. It contains analog electronical schematical symbols, including simple connection dots, resistors, impedances, transistors, mosfets, tubes and much more. Most of those are mirrored and rotated in advance, so it should be pretty easy to work with.

Advantages

The advantage of using this library (in connection with Xfig of course) is rather obvious. There are other product out there, like Orcad and various Spice variants, yet, this one just looks better in my humble opinion. This is mostly due to Xfig itself, but this library is also focused on users being able to make connections between component pins at even low resolution, for example you can take out subgrids of inductors and transformators easily without having to go to "free-hand" mode.

Why "FRITS"?!

In the mid 1970s (yours truly about to enter the teenage years) one of my classmates' dad had this large basement, where he practised his main hobby; being a radio amateur. The room was stuffed with tons of homebrewed equipment, oscilloscopes blinking, loudspeakers scratching and beeping, boxes filled with electronic devices etc. Experiencing this (at that age) was a great inspiration to me, so what could be more natural than to call this library FRITS, since he, this interesting father of one of my friends, was late Frits Nielsen (callsign OZ7FN).

Downloads

The current version of FRITS is 0.91, and it can be downloaded from http://acoustics.aau.dk/~sko/frits/frits-0.91.tar.gz (2004-10-28)
http://acoustics.aau.dk/~sko/frits/frits-0.90.tar.gz (2004-10-16)

An example PDF file: frits-examples.pdf

Installation

This is quite straightforward on RedHat/Fedora systems, but it might work for other distributions as well.
1) Unpack the tar-ball in your own /home/<user> directory.
2) Login as root, using "su"
3) Type: "cp -b -r Frits /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xfig/Libraries"
Next time you startup Xfig, you'll see Frits amongst the other libraries.

To do...

Well, quite a lot actually. I am not satisfied with the inductors, but I have a plan... The lib has no operational amplifiers; those were put low-priority, since it is assumed that everybody can draw a triangle, but of course eventually they should be made part of the library.
RPMs should be created, as soon as I find the time...