windvi, printing

[Hans Hagen]

Fabrice POPINEAU wrote:

> Let me know ... I wonder how the  commercial implementations of TeX do
> their printing. I mean : many people use  Postscript specials in a way
> or another (am I wrong ?)  .

They provide specials like \special{color rgb .4 .5 .3} to sort this
out. 
 
> So you can't print  those files without  a postscript interpreter, say
> gs.  So given you need gs to render those  specials, as well ask dvips
> to print and pipe this to gs if the printer is not a ps one. Is it the
> way  to go ?  The alternative is to print  through the windows printer
> driver. That is possible too ... but it is much inaccurate (wrt ps) to
> print what windvi shows. Look at the wtest sample in windvi 0.55 .

So, I suggest to support a specific set of specials, or even better,
just support the latest proposal of the ntg tex 2000 group. Taco can
send you the details. 

Anyhow, If I would use XDVI for printing, I would just define myself a
XDVI special driver (i.e. just another specification file that hooks
into the context special driver mechanism), which in itself is rather
trivial. So, just come up with something and the packages will support
it. 

Hans


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