PSTricks and Textures

[Thomas Meigen]

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First, I also would like to thank those people (specially Denis Girou)
involved in the development of pstricks. Since more than one year I use
pstricks
on the MAC (textures 1.7 and 1.8) for graphical programming in LaTeX.
Besides different specific tasks (where I sometimes think about
whether it would be easier and faster to make a graph in Canvas or Igor)
I use it for slide-production (together with the seminar package) and
for poster-production (together with the poster package).
Meanwhile the basic pstricks-tasks are performed very well.

However, as we are discussing several problems in pstricks and textures,
I want to share some experience with you.

1. In the beginning (1996) my major problem was to get pstricks work
with seminar. When I tried to replicate the examples of the
seminar package where pstricks was used for background/slideframe
definition, I could not print to my Laserwriter. At the end it
turned out to be a problem of the textures.def file. Due to some
emails to Denis Girou, David Carlisle and Artur Ogawa (thanks to
all of you!!!) we found that there were some lines missing in the
textures.def file. This is no longer a problem. The lines are
added to newer versions of the textures.def file. For me it was
surprising to see that no other textures-user had problems with
this bug. On the other hand: There are few MAC user, few people
that use TeX on the MAC (compared to Word etc) and if people use
the MAC and TeX, even fewer people use textures AND pstricks.
A comparable situation arises for the psfrag package, where
the dvips-driver supports psfrag-substitutions in epsf-files,
but not the textures-driver.

2. Some weeks ago I wanted to update my pstricks package
to pstricks97. I tried to follow the instruction similar to Alexander Leonessa

>    >>> 2. Rename textures17.con as pstricks.con.
>    >>> 3. Run pst-make.tex under Plain format to create files
>    >>> pstricks.tex     pstricks.pro
>    >>> pst-node.tex     pst-node.pro
>    >>> pst-coil.tex     pst-coil.pro

> Alexander.Leonessa> After that, I compiled pst-make.tex,
> (which is to say src.old/pst-make.tex)

and run pst-make.tex. There were three problems:

- I found no pst-make.tex file in the new generic-folder. Is it correct
to use the src.old/pst-make.tex version? As Denis pointed out this
might mix different versions.
- pst-make.tex uses a pstricks.doc file to produce the .pro-file.
Similar for pst-node.doc and pst-coil.doc. There are no such files
in the new generic -folder.
- how can I get the other ".pro" files (pst-grad.pro, pst-text.pro).
I could not remember how I produced them in 1996. Perhaps
they were included in the pstricks package at that time.
In the dvips-folder they are present, thus I think there might be some
way to produce them from the supplied files.

At the end I stopped the update and I am still using the old version
with the old gradient.pro files etc.

3. Thanks for that hint:
>  Michael J. Sharpe <msharpe at euclid.ucsd.edu> remember me some minutes ago ...
>that he already answer here to this question this summer. I apologize to have
>forgotten his answer tonigh...
>
>  His answer is on: http://www.tug.org/ListsArchives/pstricks/msg00034.html
>
>  This summer, I must say that there was no confirmation of his informations,
>but if now you and Michal can confirm, we could this time add them to the
>README to avoid such disagreements to new Textures users...

I will try to get the update to the newest version of textures which should
fix these
problems.

4. When I used precompiled formats where pstricks was included in the format,
I got an error message from the LaserWriter. When looking in the ".ps" file
from printing to a file, I found that the ".pro" files were not included.
When the pstricks package was loaded with a "\usepackage{pstricks}" command,
they were included and the output was fine. However this takes much more time.
Thus I used two different precompiled formats: One for fast text processing
and testing of the layout onscreen, another for printing to the
LaserWriter. Is there a better solution?

5. A major problem seems to be that there are few "TeX & textures" users
involved in the development of pstricks (& psfrag). Even if I am not able
to do such things myself, I could test and report errors of the textures
implementation of TeX. As a relatively new user I did not expect that the
worldwide
TeX community needs information from such new users like me. But it
seems to be different...



Thomas


Thomas Meigen   Uni-Augenklinik
                Josef-Schneider-Str. 11
                D-97080 Wuerzburg
Tel.:           ++49(931)201-2437
Fax:            ++49(931)201-2245
Email:          t.meigen at augenklinik.uni-wuerzburg.de




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