pgf/TikZ terminal for (La)TeX

[Mojca M. <moj...@gm...>]

Hello,

I was a bit bored today and decided to rewrite the ConTeXt terminal to
spit out some (La)TeX-friendly code in TikZ (there is currently no
decent LaTeX terminal except epslatex which doesn't work with pdfTeX).

The big advantage of TikZ is that it's fully portable (it works with
plain TeX, LaTeX and ConTeXt, and works with e-TeX+dvips, pdfTeX,
XeTeX, LuaTeX, 4ht, ... you name it), and much more powerful and
standard than any other other ancient graphic hacks (plenty of
terminals which don't work with anything except LaTeX+dvips).

A slight disadvantage is that - yes, you need at least one additional
TeX package (TikZ) that doesn't come by default on any linux system
except Debian (some people make effort to bring it to other platforms
as well).

The code is really preliminary, but it works (lacks color, proper font
switching, some fancy features - but all that is much easier to add
than to "standard LaTeX" terminal). If anyone on the list is
interested in preliminary testing (I will upload it to patches, but
it's not ready yet for public) and is able to compile the following
Hello World on the system:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\draw (1,0)--(5,2);
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

I can send him/her the code.

Mojca