10.1 GUI Installation

As xasy is written in the interactive scripting language Python/TK, it requires that both Python and the tkinter package (included with Python under MSDOS) be installed. Fedora Core users can either install tkinter with the command

yum install tkinter

By default, xasy uses the GIF image format with white as the transparent color. To overcome certain side-effects, support for an alternative transparent image format, PNG, is also available.

To enable full alpha channel support for PNG images in the Python Imaging Library (PIL) used by xasy, on UNIX systems place http://effbot.org/downloads/Imaging-1.1.6.tar.gz in the Asymptote source directory, and type (as the root user):

tar -zxf Imaging-1.1.6.tar.gz
cd Imaging-1.1.6
patch -p1 < ../patches/TkAlpha-Imaging-1.1.6.patch
python setup.py install

To configure Asymptote to use PNG files for picture deconstruction, these lines need to be in the Asymptote configuration file (see configuration file):

import settings;
xformat="png";