[texhax] will to buy the lastest version of TeXLive, but without two technical problems -- buy!

Uwe Lueck uwe.lueck at web.de
Wed Mar 4 17:21:30 CET 2015


Susan Dittmar wrote ... see 

    http://tug.org/pipermail/texhax/2015-March/021575.html

she is entirely right, I would have to quote her posting
fully, which I hate (quoting entire postings, this adresses 
a certain person ...). Explaining what I can keep from my 
ideas, and concluding that the issue essentially is SOLVED:

Yes, of course it has been the purpose of the DVI format 
also to be an intermediate step to combine TeX's typesetting 
capabilities with capabilities of other soft- and hardware. 
If difficulties of a DVI viewer are entirely due to \special 
commands, nothing is wrong. And I am ready to conclude that 
this is the case here. Nobody, "including TeX Live vendors", 
has claimed that xdvi is a perfect PostScript viewer. If you 
want to use all the capabilities of PostScript and pstricks, 
generate .ps und view it with a real PostScript viewer. If 
you insist on viewing TeX output with nothing but xdvi, you 
must care to avoid certain PostScript functions and perhaps 
try other ways to achieve your goals. There are macro packages 
for placing horizontal text properly with respect to diagram 
boxes, I mentioned some in the posting on "no PostScript"
and almost remember more (trivial but not very helpful, 
I have felt: textpos).

When I doubted that the DVI is ok, I couldn't mean much more 
than that the DVI is not xdvi-friendly. You could specify 
an output format XDVI that means "xdvi-friendly DVI", 
similarly as PDF-X or so as some restricted PDF.
It was a kind of feature request for pstricks that there 
could be a switch like \ifxdvi so pstricks would refrain 
from generating \special commands that xdvi could not handle.

So I think there is nothing to debug, and it is not a
deficiency of TeX Live that xdvi is not a full-fledged
PostScript viewer. We may stop here, maybe until Mr Perret 
asks how to generate a flowchart DVI that is xdvi-friendly, 
while I have already indicated such solutions. (It was 
Reinhard's idea, as I understand it now, to find the 
difficult PostScript commands, and ... to get a 
DVIware-friendly DVI, or just for curiosity?)

Cheers,

    Uwe. 


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