[texhax] shear transform

[Peter Davis]

Hi,

I am (still) working on a converter that will turn XML into LaTeX, and then
into PDF, PostScript, JPEG and a few other formats.  The goal is for this to
run "lights out" (completely unattended) in a 24x7 print environment.

I'm planning to use XeLaTeX, largely because of the ability to support OTF
fonts, Unicode characters, Asian and other complex scripting languages,
etc.  However ...

The XML format I'm working with allows arbitrary affine transformations to
be specified for any object on the page.  Scale and rotate seem pretty easy,
but shear is going to be tough.  The problem is that a) shear seems to
require PSTricks, b) PSTricks, when used with XeTeX/XeLaTeX, seems to
require Ghostscript, and c) I can't use Ghostscript because of GPL licensing
restrictions.

Now PDF certainly supports all the same graphics state options as
PostScript, including transformations.  So it should not be necessary to go
through PostScript.  However, I don't know of a LaTeX package that will let
me specify transformations like this for PDF.  Have I missed something?  Is
this perhaps a hidden feature of xdvipdfmx that I can access through
specials?

Thank  you!

-pd


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The Tech Curmudgeon
http://www.techcurmudgeon.com
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