[tex-eplain] eplain usepackage problems on Mac OS X and cygwin

[Oleg Katsitadze]

On Mon, Apr 17, 2006 at 11:14:14AM -0400, Dorai Sitaram wrote:
> Hmm, I thought an advantage of using \includegraphics was that you could
> have all the conversions take place behind the scenes, with context's
> \convertMPtoPDF for example.

If I remember correctly, the automatic conversion is only
possible with MetaPost output files (.mps).  Since your EPS
files seem to be MetaPost-generated, I think that this
should do the trick:

  \DeclareGraphicsRule{*}{mps}{*}{}

As for arbitrary EPS, you need to load epstopdf.sty in
addition to graphicx.sty.  This will cause the epstopdf
script to be called behind the scenes for each .eps file you
include.  Note however that you'll need eplain.tex from CVS
to load it -- I've added the definitions required by
epstopdf.sty after the 3.0 release.  You can get the CVS
version from

  http://tug.org/eplain/src/eplain.tex

There is also a test file:

  http://tug.org/eplain/src/test/epstopdf.tex

which needs the EPS graphic:

  http://tug.org/eplain/src/test/example.eps

Also, make sure that the \write18 construct is enabled, so
that external OS commands can be executed from the TeX code.
You can turn it on by adding the command line switch:

  pdfetex --shell-escape file.tex

> The thing fails long before any commands from color.sty or
> graphicx.sty are called.

This is a bug in the newer (but not the latest)
supp-mis.tex.  Your version of supp-mis.tex distinguishes
between plain TeX and LaTeX on the basis of \fmtname, and
whenever \fmtname is not `plain' or `babel-plain',
supp-mis.tex decides it is dealing with LaTeX.  Since Eplain
redefines \fmtname to be `eplain', you end up executing the
code intended for LaTeX.

I reported this to Hans Hagen and he added in the check for
`eplain'.  The fixed supp-mis.tex is at

  http://source.contextgarden.net/tex/context/base/supp-mis.tex

You can however just use the following workaround.  Redefine
\fmtname back to `plain' before including the `color'
package:

  \input eplain
  \def\fmtname{plain}% Work around the bug in supp-mis.tex

  \beginpackages
    \usepackage{color}
  \endpackages

Hope this helps,
Oleg