[texhax] Can this be done using only LaTeX?

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2 December 2010 Victor Ivrii wrote:

 > 2010/12/2 Herbert Voss <Herbert.Voss at fu-berlin.de>:
 > > Am 02.12.2010 13:39, schrieb Victor Ivrii:
 > >> On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 9:30 AM, Michael Barr <barr at math.mcgill.ca> wrote:
 > >>> I thought I had made it clear that what I was interested in was
 > >>> being able to compile it into a dvi file.  I don't think either
 > >>> tikz or pstricks does that.
 > >>
 > >> Methink that pstricks cannot do this but tikz does.
 > >
 > > Why should pstricks cannot do this??
 > 
 > 
 > Produce dvi file? I wrote "Methink" but I am not sure.

Since the DVI format doesn't support any graphic primitives except
black rectangles (\rule), both, pstricks and pgf/tikz need a post
processor.

The only exception is PDF output.  tikz/pgf does all the arithmetic in
TeX and therefore can insert graphic primitives directly into the PDF
file (as \pdfliteral).  pstricks does arithmetic in PostScript and
always needs a post processor.

If you've seen fancy things in xdvi, it's because xdvi understands a
tiny subset of PostScript commands, maybe just enough to support
LaTeX's color package.  It uses ghostscript in order to render bitmap
images.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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