xfig 2.1.8 is available on ftp.x.org in /contrib/R5fixes/xfig-patches/
xfig.2.1.8.tar.Z.  Be sure to set binary mode when transferring.

There is also an incremental patch file to convert from 2.1.7a to 2.1.8.  This
is in the file /contrib/R5fixes/xfig-patches/2.1.7a.to.2.1.8.Z.  You may use
the 'patch' program to automatically apply the changes to your 2.1.7a release.
It is compressed so you must uncompress it first.

Version 2.1.7a comes from version 2.1.7 with the patch file "patch.for.2.1.7"
applied.

You also need to get TransFig version 2.1.8.  TransFig contains the post-
processor needed by xfig to convert fig files to one of several output formats,
such as PostScript, pic, LaTeX etc.  The TransFig package is in the file
/contrib/R5fixes/transfig-patches/transfig.2.1.8.tar.Z.

Xfig is a menu-driven tool that allows the user to draw and manipulate objects
interactively in an X window.  The resulting pictures can be saved, printed
on postscript printers or converted to a variety of other formats (e.g. to
allow inclusion in LaTeX documents).

Following is a description of the CHANGES for 2.1.8.

Brian Smith
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
I don't speak for LBL; they don't pay me enough for that.

Patchlevel 8 (Oct 1, 1993)
Changes to Patchlevel 7:

NEW FEATURES:

o minimum movement for mountain/manhatten mode reduced from 7 pixels to 2
o lengths/radii of objects now displayed on first click in move point mode, not
	just when actually moving the points
o -DOPENWIN no longer necessary - xfig automatically first uses OpenWindows
	scalable fonts (e.g. times-roman-33) if they are available, X11R5
	scalable fonts next if they are available or non-scaling fonts if
	neither of the above is available.
o maximum radius of arc-boxes increased from 30 to 100 pixels
o icon now shows current filename (without full path)
o Control-L does Redraw when not in text input mode (same as Meta-R)
o popup query to shift whole figure when reading in figure file if any objects
	have negative coordinates
o mouse function window shows pan/zoom operations when control key is pressed
o popup query when exporting figure if figure has not been saved (note: this
	is not necessary for exporting current figure but is a warning to
	the user that the figure hasn't been saved yet)
o BSD-style printing on SYSV machines (like SGI) allowed by setting -DBSDLPR
	in Imakefile/Makefile
	from Dave Goldberg (dsg@blackbird.mitre.org)
o on-screen rotation of text at any angle
	xfig now uses xvertext 5.0 from Alan Richardson which allows rotation
	at any angle. The whole font is not loaded anymore, and strings are
	cached, which speeds up the interactive input of text.
o man pages no longer use .TS (table) commands for those systems whose roff
	doesn't support tables.  Also formatting cleaned up and typos fixed.
	From David W. Sanderson (dws@ssec.wisc.edu)
o double click on filename in File menu will automatically load figure
o double click on filename in Export menu will automatically export figure
o some more information about text objects has been added to the Doc/FORMAT2.1
	file - specificly about the font and font_flags fields
o keyboard accelerators for drawing/editing mode panel.  See Fig.ad for details
	From Tim MacKenzie (tym@dibbler.cs.monash.edu.au)
o Example figure which contains building blocks for making flowcharts - called
	flowchart.fig in the Examples directory (replaces old flowchart.fig)
	from Tim P. Starrin (noid@cyborg.larc.nasa.gov)
o The default is now for xfig to use X11R5 scalable fonts unless the server
	doesn't support them.  The user may still disable them with -noscalable
	or the resource "Fig*scalablefonts: false".
o new button panel in the indicator panel to set/clear or toggle update flags to
	make it easier to control which object attributes are affected by update
o new command-line paramter: -but_per_row (resource But_per_row) specifies the
	number of buttons wide the mode panel should be.  This is useful in
	conjunction with -pheight for small screens to reduce the canvas area.
o no need to add -DNO_SIGBUS to Imakefile for systems without SIGBUS anymore.
	This this is automatic now.

BUG FIXES:

o changing a filled object to unfilled now draws background correctly
o cleaned up inconsistencies with fill colors in monochrome mode
o GC's were being freed twice if window quit was executed (window manager)
o exporting figure to X11 bitmap only exported visible part of canvas
o current directory wasn't set in export popup unless file menu had been popped
	up previously
o units box didn't change from "in" to "cm" or vice versa when changing from
	Imperial to/from Metric
o editing text with popup edit at zoomscale != 1 shows correct text size now
o undo of text delete at another zoomscale shows correct text size now
o colons (:) removed from widget names (difficult to set resources with colons)
o conditional definition of index = strchr (or strchr = index) for those systems
	which already have them defined
o workaround for linux bug where certain 8-bit characters are not read properly
	by sscanf()
	from Alain Lucien Knaff (knaff@mururoa.imag.fr)
o height of cursor for text input closer to actual text height (was "descent+
	ascent" tall, now is "ascent" tall)
o <Meta>L (LoadFile function) didn't query if current figure was modified before
	re-loading file
o if normalFont can't be loaded, "fixed" font is tried - if that fails xfig
	quits with error message
o 8-bit character did not appear on canvas
o semicolon missing from "for" statement in main.c
o caused core dump if the environment variable PRINTER was not set and the
	Fig*printer*string was not set
o -startfontsize parameter wasn't being honored
o quit() function was being called with too few parameters.  This kills xfig
	on OpenWindows servers.
	From David Partain (dlp@ida.liu.se)
o fixed bug with freeing two identical GC's (caused coredump when quitting on
	certain machines)
o fixed bug inadvertently introduced in 2.1.7 which caused some arcs to be drawn
	as circles
o scaling of arc inside compound no longer produces co-linear points
o messages didn't appear in the message panel when filename panel wasn't
	large enough
o parameter missing from call to curve() which made strange half-ellipse for box
	curve radius indicator. Caused massive problems for OpenWindows servers.
o moved two accelerators (SaveFile and LoadFile) from top-level to the File
	widget heirarchy (this was causing OpenWindows servers to eat memory)
o work around for bug in OpenWindows 2.0 with bitmaps in widgets (caused
	BadMatch error when popping up the print panel)
o duplicate .TP in xfig.man caused nroff to throw away the text following the
	"Dismiss" description in the print section
o emptyname() dereferenced null pointer if printer name was NULL
o malloc didn't alloc enough space for fontname + null in w_drawprim.c
o text outline box was sometimes drawn incorrectly
o Renamed ICONFIGFILES (already used by X11 config) to ICONXFIGFILES and defined
	it in Imakefile (it was referenced but undefined)