[metapost] MetaPost 0.992 and %&latex

[Reinhard Kotucha]

>>>>> "Karl" == Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org> writes:

  >> associated macro package to spit out literals instead of
  >> specials etc)

  > Um, what "associated macro package"?  In my blissful ignorance,
  > I've never heard of this.  I do not know what happens with
  > \special when there is pdf output, but I assume it's something
  > reasonable.  At least, I've never seen any complaints.

I think that the question is what macro packages which produce something
like \special{ps: 0 0 moveto 10 20 lineto stroke} will do when the
engine is going to produce PDF.

Macro packages usually detect whether PDF mode is activated and load
an appropriate driver file which translates drawing primitives to
either postscript specials or pdfliterals.  I suppose that pgf even
detects whether it is running in tex4ht and produces SVG then.

The latex graphics package and hyperref also detect whether PDF mode
is activated and behave accordingly.

An exception is pstricks because it heavily depends on a postscript
interpreter.  There is no solution yet but just a workaround based on
some non-PS-tricks.  Maybe someone will replace pstricks by luatricks
in the future.

Karl, nowadays everything seems to work properly, but I suppose that
you remember the discussion some years ago when everything except
Knuth's tex had been moved to pdfetex.  There had been a few macro
packages which contained "\ifx\pdfoutput\undefined" but did not check
the actual value of \pdfoutput.  I'm glad that nobody complained.

Cheers,
  Reinhard

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