PSTricks and Textures

[Michal Marvan]

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Hi,

Thanks a lot for clarification and critisizm from everybody. Also, I am very sorry for the misleading "instructions" I sent yesterday.

I tried the "new" procedure, which is as simple as follows: 
- get files from pstricks/generic and pstricks/dvips (and pstricks/latex, if needed)
- put them in the TeX input folder
- rename textures17.con to pstricks.con
- open the pstricks.pro file and replace the line 

/STV { SDict begin normalscale end STP  } def

with

/STV { Mag 72.27 72 div mul dup neg scale STP  } def

(thanks to Michael J. Sharpe). 

In my current environment (Textures 1.7.7) this really works (by the pstricks/orig.doc/pst-test.tex test). If the pstricks.pro file is left unchanged, a PostScript error on the third page of pst-test.tex is produced. (I know that pst-test.tex is currently not supported.)

Can anybody confirm this? 

I also observed that PSTricks runs well and without PostScript errors even if all the files go to a subfolder of the TeX input folder. So, this was another incorrect statement in my previous mail.


Now everything appears to be really simple. Hardly it needs any explanation (other than clear statement that the old way with pst-make is contraproductive).

However, I still think that people would appreciate if README contains a section named INSTALLATION with just a few words about which folders are to be copied where and which folders may contain invalid information. If there are *no* installation instructions, people may tend to look for them elsewhere, with unwanted consequences. And in fact, pstricks.pro (and similarly other files in pstricks/dvips) says:

> % PostScript prologue for pstricks.tex.
> % Created 1994/6/23. Source file was pstricks.doc
> % Version 0.93a-97 patch 1, 97/11/07
> % For use with Rokicki's dvips.

Is this good for Textures, which do not have Rokicki's dvips? One also reads at the beginning of pstricks/generic/textures17.con:

> %% Configuration file for PSTricks v0.93a, 93/03/12.
> %% For use with Textures, v1.7 (and later?).
> %%
> %% This uses the header files. You must first run pst-make.tex
> %% to generate new .tex and .pro files.

For me this was a *clear* instruction, which did not contradict anything what I have read in README. 


Let me finally express my highly positive attitude towards the author and the current maintainers of PSTricks. Undoubtedly they are devoting a lot of time to their free service for the TeX community and I am grateful for that, indeed. 

- Michal Marvan


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