[OS X TeX] Odd table behavior

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 26 juil. 04, à 15:26, Lisa Schweitzer a écrit :

> I have a landscaped table using "rotating" that works great in 
> TeXShop, but when I compile a dvi in OzTex, the table is not only NOT 
> rotated, but it is shifted way down on the page, and way to the right. 
> Why is this? Obviously I have the output i need, but I want to 
> understand the difference in these programs for my own satisfaction.

OzTeX, like Textures, is software from the pre-OS X days, when display 
was done in Mac OS through a set of graphical routines called 
QuickDraw. In OS X QuickDraw has been replaced by Quartz, which is 
based on PDF and thus more friendly towards pdfTeX or TeX + dvips + 
ps2pdf.

Before OS X, in OzTeX and Textures, QuickDraw was used for screen 
display and non-PostScript printing, and PostScript for (obviously) 
PostScript printing. However, QuickDraw had many limitations compared 
with PostScript; in particular, it could not rotate stuff (I think). If 
I'm not mistaken, OzTeX, in its Carbon version, still uses QuickDraw 
(like many other programs, Camino included).

More technically: OzTeX by default creates .dvi output from a .tex 
file, and then uses on one side its built-in DVI-to-screen translator 
(based on QuickDraw) for displaying this output, and on the other side 
dvips for printing it (earlier in its history OzTeX used its own 
DVI-to-PS translator). However, the magic in LaTeX's graphics/x 
package, on which the rotating package is based, is achieved by 
inserting, in the .dvi file, \special commands specific to either dvips 
or pdfTeX, depending on which engine you use. OzTeX DVI-to-screen 
translator cannot do anything with these commands, due to the 
limitations of QuickDraw, and leaves them uninterpreted (more exactly, 
it understands some of these commands, like those for scaling and 
color, but not those for rotation). Hence what you see, but the file 
should print properly. You can also check this by applying to the DVI 
output from OzTeX, in the Tools menu, DVIPS then ps2pdf (assuming 
you've got teTeX installed and have loaded the configuration file "Use 
texmf tree" in OzTeX), and visualizing the result in Preview.

None of this happens in OS X with TeXShop or iTeXMac, because these are 
based on Quartz, which is all PDF and is used for both display and 
printing and is also the default output format of both TeXShop and 
iTeXMac.

Regarding the sidewaystable environment: I use it at times for 
producing landscape tables, and recently I've noticed one limitation: 
if you use the hyperref package to insert hyperlinks in the table, you 
need to use TeXShop's "TeX + Ghostscript" (in reality TeX + dvips + 
ps2pdf) mode, not pdfTeX. Due to limitations in the way that pdfTeX 
builds a page, hyperlinks in a rotated table won't work properly (a 
hyperlink will be created, but it will not be positioned on the page at 
the place where the corresponding text appears).

Bruno Voisin

--------------------- Info ---------------------
Mac-TeX Website: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
           & FAQ: http://latex.yauh.de/faq/
TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
List Post: <mailto:MacOSX-TeX at email.esm.psu.edu>