PSTricks and Textures

[Denis Girou]

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    Thomas Meigen > from pst-test.tex! However, I was not successful in using the pst-text package.
    Thomas Meigen > When printing the testfile tp-test.tex

  What we can do on this side to help users to test their installation, is to
propose a new test set. Obvioulsy a good candidate for that is made by the
examples used in LGC, which are already freely available in CTAN/info/lgc
(suppressing few non very portable - the one using very special font).
Nevertheless, there are not easy to manage, as separated in a lot of files.
Sebastian has a script for that, but I think that it will cause portability
problem too (it require Perl). But I can merge the files myself to try to
propose a generic test file easy to used (if for instance it doesn't require
too much TeX memory!)

    Michal.Marvan> It seems to me that the most important and urgent thing is to set up 
    Michal.Marvan> standard README files for PSTricks (and subdirectories, if reasonable).
    Michal.Marvan> The now obsolete file read-me.pst is a good example of what I mean.
    Michal.Marvan> It had clear structure and was easily understood by a novice. 

  I agree without restriction. I can do that next week (it will be better to
have at this time information about the problem mentionned by Thomas Meigen
on texts along a path, if we must introduce restrictions of usage under
Textures).

    Sebastian> Do people think that the "unsupported" part of PSTricks (ie original
    Sebastian>  source and so on) should be more clearly flagged as such on CTAN? I'd
    Sebastian>  be quite in favour of that

    Michal.Marvan> In my opinion, the present layout is O.K. 

  I must say that I am more on Sebastian opinion. I think something like this
one will be definitely clearer (I emphasize only the important READMEs here,
but I agree to have one in each directory):

    README
    contrib
    doc
    dvips
    generic
    latex
    obsolete
      README
      doc (current origdoc)
      src (current src.old)

  Nevertheless, there is still an ennoying point here for the documentation
(see later)...

  doc must have the "supported documentation": today the source of my
`pst-fill' one - when I will be able to give access to the source file, what
is to say somewhere in March, when some formatting macros used internally
could be available).

    Michal.Marvan> But, generally speaking, users will be happier if all parts of PSTricks 
    Michal.Marvan> are either obsolete or supported. In my opinion, manuals should always be 
    Michal.Marvan> in the latter category (e.g., the present one still recommends read-me.pst 
    Michal.Marvan> for reading).

  This is really a difficult point, even if as user I agree of course with
you... We (mainteners and users) must consider at least the following things:

    - Timothy has never announced his retirement. He is busy with other
things, with currently no time to support PSTricks (Seminar/etc.). But,
of course, all of us must hope (and pray for) that he will be back one day.
It is a major point for everybody, for the expected effects, but also
specially important for us (mainteners). In such a day, we will have to
justify and explain to him all the changes made inside his files (which are
already rather numberous!) More limited there will be, less difficulties we
will have!

    - For the user's documentation point of vue, the up to date source must be 
considered today as the PSTricks chapter of "The LaTeX Graphics Companion"
- incidentely I remember to people who have this book that an official errata
list is maintened by Frank Mittelbach on CTAN/macros/latex/base/grphcomp.err
(there will be also later the PSTricks chapter of Alan Hoenig book - that
I haven't yet seen). But obviously I know that this is not a very "satisfaying"
answer: nobody is forced to buy this book and in any case it never want to be
a reference manual, as it doesn't speak of some special or technical points and
refer for them to the reference manual itself...

    - We decided to don't change the documentation at all for 97 release,
because it would have been a long and obviously boring work, but also because
there are some clear pitfalls there:

         + It is trivial to see that the manual doesn't compile today, due to
incompatibilities in fonts management with actual LaTeX. If we solve this
problem, how many ones we will discover? And as there are a lot of special and
not obvious macros to format the manual, macros that we have of course never
studied, how many time will be required to solve possible problems with them
today (just seeing at them show that obviously changes are required today...)?

         + Nobody has the source of the "betadoc" part. Can we ask today to
Tim to give it, as he must have good reasons to don't give it in 1994 and as
we must be sure to have the same preceding problems to compile it?

         + There is no reference documentation on `pst-3d' macros? Who will
write it? (It was the same for `pst-fill' for which I write it myself, but
I never think to do it for `pst-3d'!)

         + As it would be so difficult to regenerate the manual (I don't think
to require to somebody who have a non upgraded installation since 1994 to do
all this work for us, even if I'm sure that we can found one!), how to change
even a reference to an obsolete file?

    - So, for all these reasons, I don't see what we can do, even if I'm the
first to consider the situation as sad...

    - There is still the problem (!) that users must have documentation...
If we put it in obsolete/doc, we must add in the primary README to don't miss
to look at it and to study some of its files carefully! And outside
pst-usr?.ps and betadoc?.ps, some others can be useful too.

[Sorry to have been so long...]

D.G.


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