Re: grouping available terminals together

[<HBB...@t-...>]

Ethan A Merritt wrote:

> Back to the topic of allowing color in LaTeX plots.  It seems perfectly
> reasonable to me.  

Unfortunately, Donald E. Knuth disagrees with that view.  TeX doesn't do 
colour, period.

Yes, some extensions of TeX using \special commands put into the DVI 
output file, do; as do variants of TeX such as pdftex.  But those are 
not TeX.

>> Hans-Bernhard Bröker wrote:
>>> The moment "set term latex" produces dvi files with \special in them,
>>> it becomes pointless to have it.
> 
> Could you elaborate, please?  Are you suggesting that only
> PostScript-based specials (pstricks, metapost, [e]pslatex, pstex) have
> any merit? 

No.  I'm pointing out that the whole reason for 'set term latex' to 
exist, given the much more feature-rich alternatives available, is that 
its output has a quality that none of the others can offer: it works 
with *every* valid TeX implementation, no matter how old, no matter how 
strange.  The price for this feature is that the capabilities are rather 
severely limited.  If we break this feature, there'll be no point left 
to use latex.trm instead of epslatex.trm.  In that case latex.trm would 
have become pointless.

Once we start adding features to latex.trm that require extensions or
\specials, there would be no good point at which to stop this move short 
of re-inventing epslatex.  So let's not go there.

 > Why would it be "pointless" to allow color in other LaTeX
> output via color.sty?

No.