--- Ralf Hemmecke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > C Y wrote: > > If pstricks can indeed do all that we want with fancy > > linking and diagrams it might be a better target than > > XYpic - there exist some fairly sophisticated graphing > > routines for pstricks, and it would be fun to teach Axiom > > to output (say) pst-3dplot TeX instead of an image > > for plotting. (Although I'm not sure how well it could > > render some things - experimentation would be required). > > > > I had intended to explore this possibility with XYpic, but > > initially at least it should be either XYpic or pstricks > > instead of both. If there is the desire for the other later > > it can always be added. > > I am not completely sure, but I fear that pstricks (as the > name suggests) does some trick in PostScript. I don't think > that it would be wise to rely on that package if our goal > would be to create different forms of output (dvi, ps, pdf, > html, ...).
I don't propose to rely on it, just to have it as an output option for Axiom's TeX routines. The only think we might actually rely on either of these for is for hyperlinked diagrams. So far we have (please correct me if I've missed something Bill): XYPic: Can create hyperlinked diagrams without requiring postscript specific logic, but result renders slowly in Acroread. Command syntax is complex to say the least. Does not have many packages written using it. PSTricks: Can create hyperlinked diagrams. Requires postscript logic as an intermediate step, but result appears to render much faster in Acroread than XYPic's output. Somewhat less intimidating than XYpic in the syntax department, and has a great deal of convenient plotting and other packages which may also be useful to Axiom. There are a variety of options which can be used to create pdf output to be explored, some of which also permit the use of pdflatex for final steps. Neither way has yet demonstrated the ability to reproduce these diagrams in HTML, and I am not at all sure how we would even want to proceed there. Images of the diagrams with image maps defined? Some sort of fixed text positioning? Even though viable options exist for dvi and pdf for display, no one has yet come up with a convincing way to generate a human usable diagramming of the entire system. A way must be found, and then the logic to generate the required TeX automatically will need to be created, probably as part of the Axiom build process. > Can someone convince me that one can convert from ps to other > formats easily? It's seldom effortless, but as Bill has demonstrated with the proper options the dvi->ps->pdf path can produce good results. I have a feeling html will be the kicker, but then I'm not really sure HTML is up to what we want to do in any case. Seeing Bill's result I am much more comfortable with pstricks than I was. I have a feeling there are some really neat possibilities for generating Axiom plotting output as pstricks LaTeX. This is not anything we will depend on, since Axiom can already produce graphics we can include (witness the Axiom book) but it might be a spiffy feature to offer the Axiom+LaTeX document writing crowd (hopefully there will be a lot of them in the future ;-) Cheers, CY P.S. Incidently, I tried looking at the Leo tutorials last night and my initial inclination is to stick with Emacs for now because of it's AucTeX environment and other available goodies. Leo's outlining is interesting but for the moment I am more drawn to Emacs's document editing features. Also, it wasn't clear to me how to use leo to produce both: pamphlet->legal LaTeX document with source code in correct environment pamphlet->source code that can be compiled The latter is obvious, but the former wasn't clear to me from what I read. Interesting Leo vs. Emacs remarks (maybe a bit dated now): http://groups.google.com/group/comp.emacs/browse_frm/thread/dea941c6ba7c3440/9df6397eeb5244f4?lnk=st&q=Leo+emacs&rnum=1#9df6397eeb5244f4 Maybe worth a look: http://www.jurta.org/emacs/ee/ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
