Re: inverting ps/pdf (was: Avoiding dvi files ps files (off topic?))
My gosh! If I had known there would be so much encouraging response, I would have written two years ago, when my cataracts first started to become a real pain in the neck! Thanks Krysztof, George (and others who wrote in reply): After receiving your replies I looked at the man page of xpdf (I didn't know about this viwer! Am I ignorant!!) and found it has a --colourmap option. I'll write to the author for a detailed explanation or quick fix for purely text-based files; would it be appropriate to post the result (if positive) on this list? In any case, I'd love to see what happens to Krysztof's idea of beer-on-hand topic for the EuroBachoTeX 2002 conference, especially while having a bone-fire; pity I cannot attend myself to sample the beer! Thanks folks. Kalyan Krzysztof Leszczynski writes: On Thu, Mar 28, 2002 at 12:46:07PM +0100, Martin Schroeder wrote: On 2002-03-28 10:07:59 +0530, Kalyan Mukherjea wrote: TeX document from him/her but it would be preferable if there were a switch in the ps or pdf viewers which would simply interchange ff (white) pixels for (00) black pixels. Is this a stupid/impossible suggestion from a technology-ignorant person or is something available for this purpose? At least GhostScript and xpdf have no such switch. It should be simple to implement; please contact the respective authors. I had a long talk with Piotr Pianowski (the author of psview) and he was talking with Piotr Strzelczyk and we've (in an independent way) come to similar conclusions. The problem __looks__ simple but it's certainly not. For instance, what should one do with illustrations? Should they be negativated too? Perhaps... Now if the illustration is a text-based eps or a simple graphic it probably looks best if presented in negative, but if it's a bitmapped-full-coloured picture it _probably_ should be left intact. Now, the implementation also isn't as simple as it looks, even using the wonderful Ghostscript interpreter. If you plan to convert the PDF to be still acrobat-friendly the problem are even worse This looks like a good beer-on-hand topic for the EuroBachoTeX 2002 conference, especially while having a bone-fire. Perhaps there should be an easy solution for 90% of postscript files living somewhere in the wild and 95% of simple ones, produced by text-only TeX and dvips.. Happy Easter everybody -- Krzysio Leszczynski
inverting ps/pdf (was: Avoiding dvi files ps files (off topic?))
On 2002-03-28 10:07:59 +0530, Kalyan Mukherjea wrote: TeX document from him/her but it would be preferable if there were a switch in the ps or pdf viewers which would simply interchange ff (white) pixels for (00) black pixels. Is this a stupid/impossible suggestion from a technology-ignorant person or is something available for this purpose? At least GhostScript and xpdf have no such switch. It should be simple to implement; please contact the respective authors. Best regards Martin -- http://www.tm.oneiros.de/calendar/2002/
Re: inverting ps/pdf (was: Avoiding dvi files ps files (off topic?))
On Thu, Mar 28, 2002 at 12:46:07PM +0100, Martin Schroeder wrote: On 2002-03-28 10:07:59 +0530, Kalyan Mukherjea wrote: TeX document from him/her but it would be preferable if there were a switch in the ps or pdf viewers which would simply interchange ff (white) pixels for (00) black pixels. Is this a stupid/impossible suggestion from a technology-ignorant person or is something available for this purpose? At least GhostScript and xpdf have no such switch. It should be simple to implement; please contact the respective authors. I had a long talk with Piotr Pianowski (the author of psview) and he was talking with Piotr Strzelczyk and we've (in an independent way) come to similar conclusions. The problem __looks__ simple but it's certainly not. For instance, what should one do with illustrations? Should they be negativated too? Perhaps... Now if the illustration is a text-based eps or a simple graphic it probably looks best if presented in negative, but if it's a bitmapped-full-coloured picture it _probably_ should be left intact. Now, the implementation also isn't as simple as it looks, even using the wonderful Ghostscript interpreter. If you plan to convert the PDF to be still acrobat-friendly the problem are even worse This looks like a good beer-on-hand topic for the EuroBachoTeX 2002 conference, especially while having a bone-fire. Perhaps there should be an easy solution for 90% of postscript files living somewhere in the wild and 95% of simple ones, produced by text-only TeX and dvips.. Happy Easter everybody -- Krzysio Leszczynski
Re: Avoiding dvi files
To be truthful, I'd not even thought of pdf(la)tex. Yes, this may be a reasonable solution...expect that it produces pdf, not ps, files. I'm not sure, but I think that to print pdf files to my postscript printer they first would need to be converted to ps. I'm really not all that Have your sysadmin install something like magicfilter or apsfilter which can automagically detect .dvi or .pdf and do the Right Thing(tm) to generate postscript output. On my Debian installation at home, this works excellently out of the box. However, for .dvi files it doesn't work for documents with included graphics since the printer filter runs dvips in some tmp or spool directory where it doesn't find the .eps files. /Mats
Re: Avoiding dvi files
On 26 Mar, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: On Sun, Mar 24, 2002 at 06:04:50PM +, Helen McCall wrote: I have the set of Adobe Postscript manuals and cookbook etc as published by Addison Wesley which I bought some years ago. Is there a similar set of books as a definitive reference to PDF? If so can you tell me the name of the books and the publisher? You can download the entire spec for PDF from Adobe's web site. I don't think its formally published any more. I advise reading Thomas Merz' book on PDF from Addison Wesley for cookbook reading. I've just seen the Addison-Wesley PDF Reference Manual 1.4 in the local Borders - after I finally bought the 1.3 edition last year, grrr! -- John A. Murdie Experimental Officer (Software) Department of Computer Science University of York England
Re: Avoiding dvi files
On 2002-03-26 10:36:26 +, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: You can download the entire spec for PDF from Adobe's web site. I don't think its formally published any more. But of course it is: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201758393/ :-) Best regards Martin -- http://www.tm.oneiros.de/calendar/2002/
Re: Avoiding dvi files
On Sun, 24 Mar 2002, Helen McCall wrote: Having long hated Postscript hacking, I would like to use pdf in my programming as well if it is easier. I have the set of Adobe Postscript [...] For a TeX-based workflow, metapost is worth considering. Metapost PS files are already flattened and can be translated to PDF without the need for a full PS interpreter. Hans Hagen has written TeX macros to handle this. His Metafun manual gives lots of examples (using ConTeXt). It is also worth noting that PDF pages are essentially Illustrator, so in principle you could write a macro package to handle Illustrator PS files. -- George White [EMAIL PROTECTED] Halifax, Nova Scotia
Avoiding dvi files ps files (off topic?)
Hello teTeXnicians, I have been reading this thread in a slightly bemused fashion. At first, it seemed that someone didn't like typing the same dvips + gv command over and over again. But surely that is easily solved by using Emacs + AucTeX AucTeX helps track LaTeX errors and once no more errors remain, \C-c \C-c File [Ret] causes dvips to be run on the dvi output; one can even specify various command line options. This is obviously not what you guys are talking about; I wish I understood the problem: but I would like to put forward the CONVERSE PROBLEM! . Because of visual impairment, I find it very difficult (nearly impossible) to read black text on a white background. As a mathematician all my documents are set with LaTeX and I view the results using xdvi -rv (the reverse video switch). My problem is that most documents on the MathSci Net of AMS are in pdf or ps format and I cannot read them. At times I have contacted the author and obtained a TeX document from him/her but it would be preferable if there were a switch in the ps or pdf viewers which would simply interchange ff (white) pixels for (00) black pixels. Is this a stupid/impossible suggestion from a technology-ignorant person or is something available for this purpose? Apologies in advance for this, possibly, off-topic intrusion. Kalyan Mukherjea
Re: Avoiding dvi files
In article [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Sebastian Rahtz wrote: Is it possible to setup tetex to produce postscript files instead of dvi? I find that I'm almost always converting the dvi to ps, either for printing or even on-screen viewing ... I can type 'dvips ...; gv ...' almost in my sleep. Why don't you use xdvi? To be truthful, I'd not even thought of pdf(la)tex. Yes, this may be a reasonable solution...expect that it produces pdf, not ps, files. I'm not sure, but I think that to print pdf files to my postscript printer they first would need to be converted to ps. I'm really not all that Have your sysadmin install something like magicfilter or apsfilter which can automagically detect .dvi or .pdf and do the Right Thing(tm) to generate postscript output. mrc -- Mike Castle [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.netcom.com/~dalgoda/ We are all of us living in the shadow of Manhattan. -- Watchmen fatal (You are in a maze of twisty compiler features, all different); -- gcc
Re: Avoiding dvi files
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: On Saturday, 23. March 2002 22:02, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is it possible to setup tetex to produce postscript files instead of dvi? I find that I'm almost always converting the dvi to ps, either for printing or even on-screen viewing ... I can type 'dvips ...; gv ...' almost in my sleep. Wouldn't it be a smart solution to write a simple script which contains these commands and does the conversion automatically ? You could name that script pstex for example and it would have a layout similar to tex $1 dvips ... gv ... Yes, I'd thought of that...but it's not all that simple. I think the biggest hassle is writing code to check to see if the (la)tex file compiled properly... Guess I was hoping that someone had done it already :) Somebody somewhere has written a big Makefile template for this, and of course there are dozens of TeX environments around that do things like this. However, I thought I'd read of some version of tex which did produce ps files directly. Maybe it's a commercial version or something. pdflatex perhaps? PDF nowadays is mostly as ubiquitous as PostScript. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Avoiding dvi files
On Sat, Mar 23, 2002 at 02:02:38PM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is it possible to setup tetex to produce postscript files instead of dvi? I find that I'm almost always converting the dvi to ps, either for printing or even on-screen viewing ... I can type 'dvips ...; gv ...' almost in my sleep. -- Bob van der Poel ** Wynndel, British Columbia, CANADA ** EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] WWW: http://users.uniserve.com/~bvdpoel Once set .. alias x=latex file.tex alias y=dvips file.dvi -o file.ps : file.ps gv file.ps In gv switch on State-Watch file to automatically update the gv-screen after every change to file.ps. This is espeacially usefull for documents with more than one page. You can select the page your are working on and stay there. Then for the trial and error phase you only have to type x and y. If you use gvim as your editor it opens its own window and puts itself into the background leaving the shell command line of your terminal free. gvim also understands latex and shows commands in different colors. -- Best regards Klaus
Re: Avoiding dvi files
On Sat, Mar 23, 2002 at 05:06:56PM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: To be truthful, I'd not even thought of pdf(la)tex. Yes, this may be a reasonable solution...expect that it produces pdf, not ps, files. I'm not sure, but I think that to print pdf files to my postscript printer they first would need to be converted to ps let your print spooler handle it I'm really not all that familiar with pdf, except that I know that xpdf doesn't display type3 fonts properly so dont use Type3 fonts and acroread is huge and slow. a matter of opinion? Is there some overwhelming reason to use pdf instead of ps? yes, because we have pdftex but we dont have pstex! PDF is the way things are going, because its much simpler than PS for software writers -- Sebastian Rahtz OUCS Information Manager 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431
Re: Avoiding dvi files
Thomas Anders wrote: I'm quite surprised that nobody has mentioned latexmk yet: http://www.phys.psu.edu/~collins/software/latexmk-jcc/ It's in Perl and works like a charm. Too bad it's not a proper CPAN _module_ that can be used in other projects. Thanks for this pointer. Grabbed it, and it seems to work quite nicely! BTW, this thread is probably OT. Yes, it got that way quite quickly ... I did start it off intending it to be a simple tetex question... -- Bob van der Poel ** Wynndel, British Columbia, CANADA ** EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] WWW: http://users.uniserve.com/~bvdpoel
Avoiding dvi files
Is it possible to setup tetex to produce postscript files instead of dvi? I find that I'm almost always converting the dvi to ps, either for printing or even on-screen viewing ... I can type 'dvips ...; gv ...' almost in my sleep. -- Bob van der Poel ** Wynndel, British Columbia, CANADA ** EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] WWW: http://users.uniserve.com/~bvdpoel
Re: Avoiding dvi files
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On Saturday, 23. March 2002 22:02, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is it possible to setup tetex to produce postscript files instead of dvi? I find that I'm almost always converting the dvi to ps, either for printing or even on-screen viewing ... I can type 'dvips ...; gv ...' almost in my sleep. Wouldn't it be a smart solution to write a simple script which contains these commands and does the conversion automatically ? You could name that script pstex for example and it would have a layout similar to tex $1 dvips ... gv ... You may also need to cut the .tex extension from the filename and add .dvi and .ps extensions -- FN=`strip_ext $1` #system dependent DVINAME=$FN.dvi ... CU INGO -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE8nRizy6Pb53AsRKkRAqqYAKCE9oxPR8Q0x0CF3QxnRqf5AewD/QCeN36D 5kquc40TN/JlXF6Iysj/hzg= =2MIZ -END PGP SIGNATURE-
Re: Avoiding dvi files
Sebastian Rahtz wrote: On Sat, Mar 23, 2002 at 02:02:38PM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is it possible to setup tetex to produce postscript files instead of dvi? I find that I'm almost always converting the dvi to ps, either for printing or even on-screen viewing ... I can type 'dvips ...; gv ...' almost in my sleep. this is why god (or other deity of your choice) gave you pdftex. just use pdftex followed by xpdf|gv|acroread. To be truthful, I'd not even thought of pdf(la)tex. Yes, this may be a reasonable solution...expect that it produces pdf, not ps, files. I'm not sure, but I think that to print pdf files to my postscript printer they first would need to be converted to ps. I'm really not all that familiar with pdf, except that I know that xpdf doesn't display type3 fonts properly and acroread is huge and slow. Is there some overwhelming reason to use pdf instead of ps? Thanks for the response. -- Bob van der Poel ** Wynndel, British Columbia, CANADA ** EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] WWW: http://users.uniserve.com/~bvdpoel
Re: Avoiding dvi files
Ingo Krabbe wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On Saturday, 23. March 2002 22:02, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is it possible to setup tetex to produce postscript files instead of dvi? I find that I'm almost always converting the dvi to ps, either for printing or even on-screen viewing ... I can type 'dvips ...; gv ...' almost in my sleep. Wouldn't it be a smart solution to write a simple script which contains these commands and does the conversion automatically ? You could name that script pstex for example and it would have a layout similar to tex $1 dvips ... gv ... Yes, I'd thought of that...but it's not all that simple. I think the biggest hassle is writing code to check to see if the (la)tex file compiled properly... Guess I was hoping that someone had done it already :) However, I thought I'd read of some version of tex which did produce ps files directly. Maybe it's a commercial version or something. Thanks for the reply -- Bob van der Poel ** Wynndel, British Columbia, CANADA ** EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] WWW: http://users.uniserve.com/~bvdpoel
Re: Avoiding dvi files
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On Sunday, 24. March 2002 01:10, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yes, I'd thought of that...but it's not all that simple. I think the biggest hassle is writing code to check to see if the (la)tex file compiled properly... Guess I was hoping that someone had done it already However, I thought I'd read of some version of tex which did produce ps files directly. Maybe it's a commercial version or something. It shouldn't be that hard to implement that. For your special case you have to run tex/latex in batch mode of course. You could pipe the stderr to a grep filter that searches for errors. On the other hand if you aren't sure if there are errors in your tex you should enter a debug -- view cycle without producing the PS ! As long as the tex file isn't as you like it, xdvi is much better viewer than GV or any other postscript thing, since you can handle different page sizes in DVI files much more accurate than with gv or postscript streams, and its many many many times faster !! As far as PDF is concerned, if you really have a native PS printer I cannot say anything about it but if you pipe your files through ghostscript to produce HP-PCL or Epson or some other printer format you are on the safer side, since ghostscript is quite good in handling PDF files, (as far as I know, blame me if I'm wrong). PDF files can also be viewed by gv or similar programs that use ghostscript to process input files. Though you lack some PDF specials, but ready to print files look quite good through gv, although I prefer xpdf. CU INGO -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE8nTF2y6Pb53AsRKkRAr49AJ91yXWaJInsAtCMcNFl0WUfzxla7QCfY4l5 4BxyNGQSDLkXvH5GhEavZVE= =Jmci -END PGP SIGNATURE-
Re: Avoiding dvi files
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Sebastian Rahtz wrote: On Sat, Mar 23, 2002 at 02:02:38PM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is it possible to setup tetex to produce postscript files instead of dvi? I find that I'm almost always converting the dvi to ps, either for printing or even on-screen viewing ... I can type 'dvips ...; gv ...' almost in my sleep. this is why god (or other deity of your choice) gave you pdftex. just use pdftex followed by xpdf|gv|acroread. To be truthful, I'd not even thought of pdf(la)tex. Yes, this may be a reasonable solution...expect that it produces pdf, not ps, files. I'm not sure, but I think that to print pdf files to my postscript printer they first would need to be converted to ps. I'm really not all that familiar with pdf, except that I know that xpdf doesn't display type3 fonts properly and acroread is huge and slow. Is there some overwhelming reason to use pdf instead of ps? For printing, no, for electronic distribution of documents, yes. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Avoiding dvi files
On Sat, Mar 23, 2002 at 02:02:38PM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is it possible to setup tetex to produce postscript files instead of dvi? I find that I'm almost always converting the dvi to ps, either for printing or even on-screen viewing ... I can type 'dvips ...; gv ...' almost in my sleep. this is why god (or other deity of your choice) gave you pdftex. just use pdftex followed by xpdf|gv|acroread. -- Sebastian Rahtz OUCS Information Manager 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431
