[XeTeX] Some problems with PSTricks

[John Was]

Hello all

If it is of any relevance, using plain XeTeX in Windows XP I certainly have 
a lot of trouble with PS Tricks line-drawing commands mingled with plain 
text:  usually the very first command works and after that there are many 
strange effects (subsequent line-drawing commands on the same page are often 
ignored, and strangest of all, a line-drawing command on the next page will 
be ignored but the successful one on the preceding page will be repeated on 
the next page in the PDF output even though it is not present at that point 
in the .TEX file!).  This is a pity since I do quite often want (for 
example) to draw arrows between phrases in tables, and this is unproblematic 
in my old and very stable 4AllTeX distribution (which doesn't handle Unicode 
of course).

Other PS Tricks commands, such as \rput to reposition text or \psscalebox to 
stretch and shrink text, seem to work reliably.

Separate PS Tricks pictures using lines and arrows are sometimes incomplete 
though there is no hint of an error in the input:  indeed, Sumatra tends to 
show them correctly whereas in Acrobat I might (for example) find there is a 
line missing from a triangle.  (Unfortunately, everything has to be 
satisfactory in Acrobat in order to pass a PDF file on for book-printing.)

I'm hoping the glitches will disappear in the 2008 TeXLive distribution!

Best


John

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ulrike Fischer" <news2 at nililand.de>
To: <xetex at tug.org>
Sent: Saturday, June 21, 2008 12:02 PM
Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Some problems with PSTricks


> Am Sat, 21 Jun 2008 04:08:29 +1000 schrieb VAFA KHALIGHI:
>
>> Ok, so let's say pst-fill and pst-text does not work. But I also 
>> experiened
>> some problems with pst-calendar and pst-light3d
>
> As a miktex user I can't currently test pstricks with xelatex. But as
> far as I know it works more or less in this way:
>
> xelatex is putting a lot of specials in the xdv-file, xdvipdfmx calls
> ghostscript to convert the postscript parts in a pdf-image and then
> xdvipdfmx inserts this pdf-image in the final pdf.
>
> So I would start tests with graphics inside a pspicture environment (and
> its bounding box) and expect trouble with pstricks code which is mixed
> with normal text.  That is I would expect similar restrictions as with
> the preview package or pst-pdf.
>
> -- 
> Ulrike Fischer
>
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