[pstricks] Pstricks and pdftex

[MicroPress Inc.]

At 04:14 PM 9/29/02 +0100, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
>On Sun, 29 Sep 2002 10:18:56 -0400
>John Culleton <john at wexfordpress.com> wrote:
>
>> Pdftex and Context open new vistas to the TeX user. Unfortunately they
>> shut the door to the original pstricks. For pdflatex users there is
>> pdftricks.sty. Is there anything the user of pdftex or Context can do
>> to utilize pstricks?
>
>You'll never be able to harness the full power of PSTricks without
>having a full PostScript interpreter in pdftex. You might want to look at VTeX,
>which has such I thing (I gather; I have not tried it). 

It has; but VTeX currently does not have a context driver. Writing one should
be however considerably less work than coming up with some new approach.
The other issue is that it is not clear if context would work with pstricks
at all:
is it compatible with the color.sty, for example?

[snip]

>
>Of course, if you want to have real fun, try implementing an SVG interpreter
>using ConTeXt's XML parser, and write "svgtricks". Eminently doable, I
believe, for someone
>with a few months to spare.
>-- 

IMHO, not very interesting, since (1) svg is a "static" language: no loops,
for example; thus
much of pstricks not be useful and (2) the best part of svg is animation/js
which would be 
stripped off in a such interpreter. More interesting application would be to
supplement 
existing pstricks with some animation and then compile into SVG. Current
VTeX (which 
does have SVG mode) includes some early examples of how this can be done.

==MV==

---------------------------------------------
Michael Vulis
MicroPress

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