What are the best software's to draw high quality electronic circuit diagrams ? The diagrams should be of publication quality. Looking for open source or free tools.
For schematics with discrete components, opamps, comparators and alike: one of the Spice variants from all major semiconductor manufacturers (e.g. LTSpice from Linear).
For complex designs with ICs: e.g. KiCad.
You are free to use wikipedia to find more of such solutions :)
xcircuit doesn't give high quality circuit diagram. output of xcircuit is in JPG format whereas xfig gives in EPS format which is mostly used format by research community.
I use Microsoft Word. It takes some time to build the symbols but for the typical circuit diagram used in an article, it is not to bad. Easiest way to create the symbol is to find a picture of the symbol you want then draw over it at 500%. After you draw it, group it, move it off the picture then delete the picture. That way you can shrink to size and rotate your symbol at will. All the other functionality of a CAD is cantained with in Word. To make life easier be sure to save the file as a .doc (older format) which makes manipulation easier in the future. The beauty is that all is done within Word so there are no nasty compatibility issues and the diagram can be edited at any time in the event changes are necessary. Finally, create a document called Word symbols. Save all created symbols so they can be reused.
For drawing high quality circuit schematics, I would suggest you to take a chance on the latex+circuitikz suite. First steps with these tools might be hard to follow, but once you master it, the results are quite impressive.
Here you have some examples: http://texample.net/tikz/examples/circuitikz/. If you are latex user, you will find it rather simple.