[texhax] Can this be done using only LaTeX?

[Victor Ivrii]

On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 2:10 PM, Reinhard Kotucha
<reinhard.kotucha at web.de> wrote:
> On 2 December 2010 Victor Ivrii wrote:
>
>  > 2010/12/2 Herbert Voss <Herbert.Voss at fu-berlin.de>:
>  > > Am 02.12.2010 13:39, schrieb Victor Ivrii:
>  > >> On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 9:30 AM, Michael Barr <barr at math.mcgill.ca> wrote:
>  > >>> I thought I had made it clear that what I was interested in was
>  > >>> being able to compile it into a dvi file.  I don't think either
>  > >>> tikz or pstricks does that.
>  > >>
>  > >> Methink that pstricks cannot do this but tikz does.
>  > >
>  > > Why should pstricks cannot do this??
>  >
>  >
>  > Produce dvi file? I wrote "Methink" but I am not sure.
>
> Since the DVI format doesn't support any graphic primitives except
> black rectangles (\rule), both, pstricks and pgf/tikz need a post
> processor.
>
> The only exception is PDF output.  tikz/pgf does all the arithmetic in
> TeX and therefore can insert graphic primitives directly into the PDF
> file (as \pdfliteral).  pstricks does arithmetic in PostScript and
> always needs a post processor.
>
> If you've seen fancy things in xdvi, it's because xdvi understands a
> tiny subset of PostScript commands, maybe just enough to support
> LaTeX's color package.  It uses ghostscript in order to render bitmap
> images.
>
> Regards,
>  Reinhard
>
> --

Thank for clarification.

I checked with xdvi (on MacOSX 10.6.5) - it is heavily bitmapped even
with -postscript command and no grayscale (only black) but converting
to ps restores nice look. So all conditions were satisfied: it was
done in LaTeX, standalone dvi file produced and this file could be
seen nicely.

Victor


-- 
========================
Victor Ivrii, Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto
http://www.math.toronto.edu/ivrii