[pstricks] (no subject)

[Denis Girou]

>>>>> "Cyrille.Piatecki" == Cyrille Piatecki <cyrille.piatecki at univ-orleans.fr> writes:

    Cyrille.Piatecki> The suggestion is to use very little postscript code in your answers --- it 
    Cyrille.Piatecki> is not always the case --- because pstricks is a package that intend to 
    Cyrille.Piatecki> eliminate the use of that type of code.

  I cannot really agree with your opinion, nor truly understand the problem
you find here. All the power of PSTricks come from the addition of the
PostScript capabilities inside a TeX interface.

  The PSTricks internal code itself is full of PostScript codes, both the .pro
files but also the .tex ones, with many macros which embed PostScript codes.
To solve new problems, we can often just build new TeX macros which use
PSTricks ones, but sometimes we must add PostScript code too, as it does not
already exist a PSTricks macro which interface the required code. If for
instance you study some codes written by Manuel Luque for 3D geometry, you
will see that his tex files contain few lines of TeX and many ones of
PostScript...

  Nevertheless, the knowledge of PostScript is required only if you want to
understand the macros that you use (case of few people!) or to develop new
sophisticated ones. It is not at all required to use the PSTricks macros
themselves, which have always a TeX interface (outside macros like \psplot,
which require very simple and basic PostScript knowledge). So, the large
majority of users can just ignore this language...

    Cyrille.Piatecki> Know for the question :

    Cyrille.Piatecki> 1 - it will be very usefull to dispose of a command that managed all type 
    Cyrille.Piatecki> of symetry inside Pstricks. Does it exists ?

  I am not sure to fully understand to what you refer to. If you just refer to
the elementary transformations with horizontal, vertical and glided symmetry,
PSTricks is not needed (`graphics'/`graphicx' is enough). For instance, look
at the macros that I proposed to Jacques Andre for an illustration of one of
his articles (excellent and full of informations -as all that Jacques Andre
write...) :

Jacques Andre, Of the non symmetry of letters, La Lettre GUTenberg, number 21,
February 2002, pages 6-13, in French (macros are given page 12)
/anonymous at ftp.gutenberg.eu.org:/pub/GUTenberg/publicationsPDF/lettre21.pdf
(I do not know why the Web page was not updated - the 20th letter is the last
one available on http://www.gutenberg.eu.org/pub/GUTenberg/publications )

   You can perhaps also look at the page of Manuel Luque about mirrors
(in French too): http://members.aol.com/ManuelLuque3/miroirs.htm

    Cyrille.Piatecki> 2 - How can we render a transparency. That is done for the color and not 
    Cyrille.Piatecki> for the objects ? The problem is that somme time I writ an object after an 
    Cyrille.Piatecki> other and that I dont want that all the part of the first object disapear.

  There is no support of transparency in PostScript. As far as I know, only
Don Lancaster propose some solution ( http://www.tinaja.com/post01.asp
and search for "alpha transparency"), but he did not make it publicly
available. P.S. The PDF format include a support for transparency
http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/acrosdk/docs/PDF_Transparency.pdf

  If you just refer to something like "mixed" colors, as in my old example on 
overlapped surfaces ( http://tug.org/applications/PSTricks/Various ), this is
different and possible with PSTricks (we started two years ago with Manual
Luque to write a general package for additive and substractive color synthesis
of overlapped surfaces, but never finished it... Nevertheless, this is only a
question of work, as we solved the problems we found at this time).

    Cyrille.Piatecki> 3 - I would be pleased to use Pstricks to make colored headers in 
    Cyrille.Piatecki> connection with fancyheaders for exemple. How can I do such a thing ?

  I do not see where problems could be. I suppose that you doesn't want to
just color the text, in which case the `color' package is enough, but to have
a sophisticated colored background. Nevertheless, I think that this is
straigthforward...

    Cyrille.Piatecki> 4 - My last question is for color in tab. In a text TvZ show some examples 
    Cyrille.Piatecki> where the colon separting lines are colored but there is no macro for the 
    Cyrille.Piatecki> lines delimiting the tab ?

  I am not sure too to understand to what you refer to. I suppose that "tab"
is for tabular environments and that you speak about the documentation of the
old `colortab' package? Today, this package has still an interest only with
plain TeX. ConTeXt has it own solution and LaTeX has since long time now the
`colortbl' standard package from David Carlisle (which is compatible with
`longtable', which is no more the case of `colortab'). Look at it
documentation.

D.G.