<div dir="ltr">PStricks works nicely in XeTeX, only pst-text and pst-fill don't work. You also can use pstricks with shell scape option in PDFTeX. The easiest way is to use auto-pst-pdf package which makes life easier. I have been using PSTricks for a long time and still use it heavilly. There are other good tools for drawing graphics such as PGF/Tikz, metapost, asymptote, xypic and etc but none of these has the power PSTricks has. With PsTricks you combine two powerful languages (Postscript language for drawing and TeX for typesetting).<br>
<br>For your last question:<br><br>Till (author of PGF/TIKz) says: (<a href="http://www.tug.org/pipermail/pstricks/2008/005658.html">http://www.tug.org/pipermail/pstricks/2008/005658.html</a>)<br><br>`` TikZ can now do most of the things that pstricks can. (Sometimes I would not even have <br>
<pre>thought that we/I would be able to implement these things...).<br><br>There is one thing where I think that pstricks will stay to be more <br>powerful than tikz: Graphics in which text is used as a path or the <br>
base of a path. For instance, there are packages for creating "3D" <br>letters, which are generated by using a normal text, turning it into a <br>path, then doing some postscript magic to add "depth and lights". In <br>
pdf one simply cannot access text paths (partly for technical reasons, <br>partly for copyright reasons), so I think it is more or less <br>impossible to create these 3D letters as it is done in pstricks.<br><br>Currently, I also think that the commands for connecting nodes are <br>
still more powerful in pstricks (although the syntax is not very <br>good). But we are working on this...<br><br>In general, pstricks has the great advantage that a lot of <br>computational stuff can be left to the postscript interpreter, where <br>
pgf has to do the necessary computations inside TeX. For instance, if <br>you use pstricks to plot a function, depending on the function, <br>pstricks can store just the code of the function in the postscript <br>file, which is very fast and simple. pgf, on the other hand, will have <br>
to evaluate all points of the function while TeX goes over the tex- <br>file. This takes a lot of time and results in longer files.<br><br><br>The main strengths of pgf are portability, better syntax (with TikZ), <br>transparency, more powerful shapes/nodes. I also think that <br>
decorations are a pretty neat thing, which pstricks lacks.<br><br><br>According to user feedback, it seems to be an advantage that pstricks <br>has a short manual. A good book on TikZ would certainly help, here.''<br>
<br><br>And Herbert Voss (maintainer of PSTricks) says: (<a href="http://www.tug.org/pipermail/pstricks/2008/005660.html">http://www.tug.org/pipermail/pstricks/2008/005660.html</a>):<br><br>``<br>Additional to what Till already pointed out.<br>
The packages pst-text, pst-func, pst-fractal. pst-solides3d,<br>and pstricks-add (the differential equation part) are<br>difficult to realize with tikZ. On the other hand PSTricks<br>is not able to tell TeX the size of the bounding box of the<br>
image, which could be very useful for typesetting additional text , like labels, etc''<br><br><br>I think using asymtote is too much work, running pdflatex+asy+pdflatex. On the other hand, I do not think it would be possible to use asymptote with XeTeX to typeset labels with your opentype fonts.<br>
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