Re: Lua / Tikz / pgf works for pdflatex only ?

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

On 28 June 2016 at 23:38, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> Does anyone familiar with Tikz/pgf know why the output from pdflatex
> terminal or "lua tikz" terminal should not work with the normal "latex"
> command line processing as opposed to requiring "pdflatex"?
>
> https://sourceforge.net/p/gnuplot/bugs/1822/

The "plot sin(x)" as opposed to "test" works for me. I would suspect
fill patterns, but there might of course be any other reason for the
failure.

> If there is a good reason, should we put in the output LaTeX/TeX code
> some type of error message that complains when compiled without pdflatex?

That would be a very bad idea in my opinion.

First of all please note that many graphics (like "plot sin(x)") work
even when compiled via dvi->ps route. There's probably just something
wrong with pattern fill or one of those special features which might
just as well be a bug in TikZ (using pdflatex makes a lot more sense
nowadays than going through dvi, so I doubt that special features in
TikZ really get any extensive testing in the old workflow).

The other problem is that it is very tricky if not impossible to
determine the engine being used. People could use dvipdfmx instead of
dvips to process the files, or XeTeX, LuaTeX, upTeX or any other
exotic workflow. How exactly would you decide when to break the
compilation and when not?

Mojca