Printing text and PSTricks stuff separately

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At 11:33 AM 11/17/99 +0100, you wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I'm using PSTricks to make slides. 
>Recently, I discovered the package PDFslide, which is oriented towards
>screen presentation. Even though it is possible to display PS files
>full-screen, PDF files are more quicly displayed and well suited for
>``dynamical'' presentations. 
>
>As everybody knows, without Acrobat Distiller, it seems impossible to use

Only seems; VTeX handles PStricks/PSfrag in one pass TeX->Pdf compilation,
see
        http://www.micropress-inc.com
for more info, or any CTAN site 
        ../systems/vtex
for free downloads (OS/2 & Linux currently)

>PSTricks and output PDF. Using GS to convert the file to PDF is not a good
>solution because the fonts are rendered very poorly by Acrobat. Use of

This is supposed to be fixed soon in GS; possibly the current beta's of GS
would function already.

>PDFLaTeX allows to have good rendering of fonts, but then, we loose great
>features like PSTricks and PSFRAG.

[see above]
>
>Because more often PSTricks stuff is displayed in the background, with text
>laying on it, I just wondered if it could be possible to output both layers
>separately : I mean, everything which is coming from PSTricks and the text
>itself. In this way, one could convert the background to PDF or JPEG and
>use it as background in PDFLaTeX, having so good rendering of fonts and
>wonderful features of PS inclusions.
>
>OK, this seems tricky, but do we have the choice? 
>Has everybody any idea how this could be practically done, or at least if
>it's possible?

Most certainly possible. We did exactly this for the purpose of debugging
of the VTeX code generator. Notice that this will not work with some of 
Pstricks modules (pst-path, pst-text), but these are probably not the ones
you care about.

The way to do this is to hack the dvips code to write out all the PostScript-
related \special's to a separate file; then run this file through the distiller.
[make sure to emit the text positions as well, before every \special.]
>
>Thank you for any suggestion.
>
>Pascal
>
>____________________________________________________________________________
>________
>Pascal Kockaert                               Tél: +32-2-650.28.30
>Service d'Optique et d'Acoustique             Fax: +32-2-650.44.96
>Université Libre de Bruxelles  CP194/5     e-mail: Pascal.Kockaert at ulb.ac.be
>50, Av. F.D. Roosevelt          	      URL: http://www.ulb.ac.be/polytech/soa
>B-1050 Bruxelles
>BELGIQUE
>____________________________________________________________________________
>________
>
>Age quod agis
>
>____________________________________________________________________________
>________
>
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Michael Vulis
MicroPress

mailto://support@micropress-inc.com
http://www.micropress-inc.com


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