Re: the ConTeXt terminal

[Daniel J S. <dan...@ie...>]

Mojca Miklavec wrote:

> I know that I could ignore the PostScript graphic commands, but I need
> to study the way how (La)TeX &.PostScript are integrated/how separate
> files are handled inside Gnuplot, etc. I have to patch/integrate both
> terminals in this case. I'm planning to do that, but it's not really
> the priority unless someone confident with that code would be willing
> to help. For the moment is was much easier to write my own code for
> doing the graphic.

Well, it's up to you of course, and both methods have their benefits.  But if you haven't given combined LaTeX/PostScript a try, it is worth understanding.


>>Unless ConTeXt is improving on TeX graphics, from what I've seen PostScript is better than TeX graphics.  Much nicer looking and controllable arrows, etc.
> 
> 
> What exactly do you mean by TeX graphics? \begin{picture} is useless
> from my point of view, picTeX might be slightly better(?),

Yes, this is what I was referring to, TeX graphics worthless.


> which outputs a PostScript file which is postpocessed (converted to
> PDF with special trickery) and included into final PDF literally.

Something like ps2pdf, I take it.


> I
> don't know how exactly it works if a flavour of TeX other than pdfTeX
> is used, for example XeTeX, with DVI file as an intermediate step
> (.tex -> .dvi -> PDF). But when XeTeX came out for the Linux platform
> last monts, Hans was sitting the whole afternoon behind the laptop
> trying to fix the existing code, so that transparency started to work
> with XeTeX as well.
> 
> But the nice part of it is that I don't really have to care about what
> is going on behind the scenes: it simply works (with exceptions of
> bugs).

"It" meaning what simply works?


> 
> With MetaPost ("ConTeXt graphics") you can basically do everything
> that you can do in PostScript: the code is converted to PostScript
> indeed. You can't write literal PS code, but MetaPost is still a
> programming language. You can draw exactly the same arrow in MetaPost
> as you can do in PostScript.

Yes, I see that now having paged through Hans H.'s amazing document metafun-s.pdf.  Wow, he put a lot of work into that!  I wonder, though, why he didn't simply format the text more like a book as opposed to slides.  I find the gray, seemingly random borders a tad disorienting and annoying.

OK, so I've learned a bit here about ConTeXt.  Thanks.

Dan