[texhax] Problems of text's positionings in balloons with «xdvi» and «Pstricks».

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2015-03-06 at 13:48:42 +0200, Yves Perret wrote:

 > I discovered, as a matter of fact I remember, that the «xdvi» admits
 > the option «-debug <code numéral>», and I made no bones about using
 > this possibility. Did somone among you know it ?.
 > In brief, I succeed at last in producing a detailed log file, which is
 > attached to this email; it is named
 > «2015¦03¦06#traçage_des_événements_liés_au_terminal.txt» .

Well, these debug messages aren't very helpful in this case.

As some people already pointed out, Xdvi supporta small subset of
PostScript only.  Embedded graphics are passed to Ghostscript for
rendering.  Xdvi understands a very limited subset of PostScript by
itself but it isn't capable to process arbitrary PostScript code.

If you want to use Xdvi as a previewer for your document, I fear that
there is only one reasonable solution:

  1. Create a separate LaTeX file for each pstricks graphic.  Set
     \pagestyle{empty}. 

  2. Convert the DVI file to EPS with dvips -E.  The -E option creates
     a tight BoundingBox.

  3. Insert graphic files to the main document with \includegraphics.

This sounds inconvenient at a first glance but since you are on Unix,
there are many ways to automate the procedure.  A simple shell script
will do.  However, the most efficient solution is to use a Makefile.

I don't see any better solution.  Pstricks requires a fully fledged
PostScript interpreter.  Hence there is no way to avoid Dvips and
Ghostscript. 

Regards,
  Reinhard

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------
Reinhard Kotucha                            Phone: +49-511-3373112
Marschnerstr. 25
D-30167 Hannover                    mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
------------------------------------------------------------------