[pstricks] When to use metapost...when to use pstricks

[Jan Steffan]

On Thursday 14 July 2005 00:30, Christopher Ellison wrote:
> I have a 'simple' question.  Pstricks is nice because I can have the
> source for my figures directly in the source of my document...it is also
> very nice because of the all powerful packages and tools that come with
> pstricks.  I have also seen metapost.  

I'm sorry to bring up yet another option, but pgf might be worth a look, too:
http://www.sf.net/projects/pgf
It's developed by Till Tantau (author of the beamer package) and has the 
benefit of working both with latex and pdflatex without any hacks like 
ps4pdf.
Therefore it can't rely on the computational power of postscript. However, the
whole thing is very well thought out, comfortable to use and excellently 
documented. The design is very clean and split into layers of abstraction, so 
it is easy to add new backend drivers or frontends.

Citing from the amazing 200 page manual: 

1.2    Comparison with Other Graphics Packages

There were two main motivations for creating pgf:
  1. The standard LaTeX {picture} environment is not powerful enough to create 
anything but really simple graphics. This is certainly not due to a lack of 
knowledge or imagination on the part of LaTeX’s designer(s). Rather, this is 
the price paid for the {picture} environment’s portability: It works together 
with all backend drivers.

  2. The {pstricks} package is certainly powerful enough to create any 
conceivable kind of graphic, but it is not portable at all. Most importantly, 
it does not work with pdftex nor with any other driver that produces anything 
but PostScript code.
   The pgf package is a trade-off between portability and expressive power. It 
is not as portable as picture} and not as powerful as {pspicture}. However, 
it is more powerful than {picture} and more portable than {pspicture}.


-- 
 gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys DE34EFA1