Re: symbol/color/line consistency in terminals

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

Hans-Bernhard Bröker wrote:
> Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> 
>> Hans-Bernhard Bröker wrote:
> 
> 
>>> That would gravely endanger any usefulness of this driver.  The only 
>>> real virtue of "latex" compared to other Tex-family drivers (emtex, 
>>> eepic, and PostScript+LaTeX ones) is that its output is pure, 
>>> unextended, driver-independent LaTeX.  Pulling in terminal-specific 
>>> packages like "colour" would break that.
> 
> 
>> Not sure I follow.  The LaTeX driver already uses the symbol package(s).  
> 
> 
> Using packages as such is not the problem.  Using packages that only 
> work with a certain subset of DVI drivers, is.

Oh, yeah I see.  You mean such as when some xdvi output places labels out in space when rotating a block of text.  Guess so.  Ultimately comes out correctly in PostScript so it never bothered me too much.

> 
>> monochrome but also have no color commands.  Similarly, there is now 
>> rotated text, for which we can use the LaTeX rotate package. 
> 
> 
> ... which used dvips specials last I looked, so causes the same kind of 
> problem.

Not sure on that one.  I've turned on -warnspecials in xdvi and it gives plenty of warnings like:

xdvi.bin:  special "color push rgb 0 0 0" not implemented

But I don't seen any warnings for rotated text.  It could be that xdvi simply hasn't gotten around to supporting rotated text.  Any idea?

> 
> The moment "set term latex" produces dvi files with \special in them, it 
> becomes pointless to have it.

How about an option "set term latex specials"?

Dan