PSTricks

["Mojca Miklavec" <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>]

(was: Manual (English) Update soon?)

For Hans: please read further, some things need to be fixed.

On 12/29/06, John R. Culleton wrote:
>
> Jut FYI PSTricks (which runs on Plain TeX as well as LaTeX) can be run as part
> of Context. It requires loading a module and an extra pass.  Like many of
> the "undocumented" modules there is actually documentation in the module
> itself.  I suspect that if all the documentation in the source code were
> collected and organized in some way we would have a new Context Manual.

Thanks for the hint! I really like the example with \dorecurse mixed
with PSTricks; although they have their own mechanisms for that,
\dorecurse is more familiar and easier to use for me.

(I doubt that I'll return to PSTricks now that I've learn metapost and
now when TikZ is available and more portable, but it's nice to know
that I may use my old code there and for some cases PSTricks are still
an easier approach.)

I knew that there was something about pstricks available, but I always
had a feeling that it's only conditionally working (I never heard
anyone talking about PSTricks on the mailing list).

However: you're probably running the module with perl-based texexec, right?

I just tried it and had the following problems:
- filename-texapp.tex has been created (and can only be deleted
manually), but instead of dvi it resulted in an empty pdf file
- I processed that file manually, so I got the dvi, but then dvips failed
- the second was probably "my fault" (dvips sent the result to lpr),
but it's how it's set up on the system by default; using -Ppdf switch
helped, although I have no idea why/how it works exactly

So it would really help a lot:
- if the intermediate file would result in .dvi, not in .pdf
- if dvips would be called with -Ppdf or perhaps some other more
appropriate switch to assure slightly more "works-out-of-the-box"
cases
(- if temporary files could be deleted with ctxtools if needed)

It would also help a lot for tex4ht if the switch --dvi could work as
intended (and without unneded dvips run afterwards).


Mojca

PS (in a joke): why didn't you tell me that before I wrote support for
gnuplot ??? Gnuplot can already output PSTricks code which could be
read by ConTeXt then.