[9fans] kerTeX update: beamer and al.

[9fans] kerTeX update: beamer and al.

[tlaronde]

I have made an important update to kerTeX, adding 22 more recipes
(packages) including beamer (LaTeX dependent) and all its
dependencies---there are also Jean-Fran\,cois Burnol's extended
precision numerical packages, a collection of fonts (Yannis
Haralambous' old German ones, for example) and misc. dependencies of
these packages.

Since I'm not a LaTeX user, I'd like people to test beamer under Plan9
and/or 9Front, specially to verify that kpstopdf (added to kerTeX)
yields the correct PDF result---the utility invokes GhostScript at low
level in order to have PDF pages matching exactly what was specified in
the PostScript files (it is not kerTeX dependent; it should work with
any PostScript file).

The problem being that in order to have correct "fading" (shadows) on
the slides, the gs(1) "-dALLOWPSTRANSPARENCY" option has to be passed,
and I don't know if it is present in the gs(1) version of all Plan9 and
variants, and I don't know either if, with various differing beamer's
options, some details of the PS and then PDF rendering will work 
correctly or not.

TIA.

Note: if the GhostScript version bundled with some variant of Plan9
doesn't work, the solution will be... to update GhostScript. There is
nothing I can do on the kerTeX side for this. And my plan, for kerTeX,
eventually, is to have an option to get rid of the GhostScrip
dependency, i.e. to translate directly the dvi into images, using
METAFONT as RIP.
-- 
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ kergis +dot+ com>
                     http://www.kergis.com/
                    http://kertex.kergis.com/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89  250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C

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Re: [9fans] kerTeX update: beamer and al.

[tlaronde]

On Mon, Dec 16, 2024 at 10:00:54AM +0100, tlaronde@kergis.com wrote:
> I have made an important update to kerTeX, adding 22 more recipes
> (packages) including beamer (LaTeX dependent) and all its
> dependencies---there are also Jean-Fran\,cois Burnol's extended
> precision numerical packages, a collection of fonts (Yannis
> Haralambous' old German ones, for example) and misc. dependencies of
> these packages.
> 
> Since I'm not a LaTeX user, I'd like people to test beamer under Plan9
> and/or 9Front, specially to verify that kpstopdf (added to kerTeX)
> yields the correct PDF result---the utility invokes GhostScript at low
> level in order to have PDF pages matching exactly what was specified in
> the PostScript files (it is not kerTeX dependent; it should work with
> any PostScript file).
> 
> The problem being that in order to have correct "fading" (shadows) on
> the slides, the gs(1) "-dALLOWPSTRANSPARENCY" option has to be passed,
> and I don't know if it is present in the gs(1) version of all Plan9 and
> variants, and I don't know either if, with various differing beamer's
> options, some details of the PS and then PDF rendering will work 
> correctly or not.

One user reported that some recipes failed due to the copying of dirs.

I have hence updated the pkg framework to add a customized version (I
couldn't use dircp since it is, at least on 9front, a rc script; so I
ended up using tar).

You can update simply by updating the recipe tools@pkg.sh (that will
path the pkg library).

pgf@tex.sh and beamer@latex.sh have been updated (you can retrieve
them individually or on bulk with rcp@pkg.sh).

The bad news is that GhostScript is too old and, for beamer, it can't
translate the PostScript in PDF (it can't even display the
PostScript).

As said before, I can't do anything about that on the kerTeX side. For
this to work, GhostScript has to be updated. Not a small task (and
this is a reason why, I want to be able to have images without
requiring a PostScript interpreter).
-- 
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ kergis +dot+ com>
                     http://www.kergis.com/
                    http://kertex.kergis.com/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89  250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C

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