Re: Producing dvi

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

On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 15:39, Michail Vidiassov wrote:
> Dear Hans,
>
> On Sun, 19 Apr 2009, Hans Hagen wrote:
>
>>> If mkiv does not produce dvi (now? never will? not intended to?),
>>> what about mkii?
>>
>> sure, mkii can produce dvi for several drivers
>
> And what about the first part of the question?
> The (negative?) answer is implied in your other post,
> but what is the official position (if any)?

The problem is not writing DVI file per se, but conversion from DVI to
some reasonable format (both ps and pdf are problematic). As soon as
you want to use OpenType fonts and their features, dvips will not be
able to convert the DVI to valid PS any more unless someone writes
extension for it (which is very unlikely to happen).

If you insist in DVI and OpenType fonts, you could just as well take a
look at ConTeXt+XeTeX that is able to generate xdv files (extended
dvi), but I can guarantee you problems. dvips is not able to handle
XDV files.

If Asymptote is not able to handle PDF files, maybe Asymptote itself
would need extensions. (When I last tried to use Asymptote I gave up
since I was not able to figure out how to install it and started using
other tools.)

But as far as I know, if the only critical step is conversion of font
outlines into curves, gs is able to read PDF files as well. I see no
reason why one would require PS unless one uses very basic techniques
for document manipulation (it's a bit easier to parse and work with PS
than it is to work with PDF, but when it's done inside a bigger
project it probably pays off to support both; I guess that the
overhead should not be that big).

If you would like asymptote to handle ConTeXt labels you should start
with mkii. But honestly: I don't really see when LaTeX for typesetting
labels would not suffice. ConTeXt is extremely good at page
formatting, but when it comes to typeset "$A$" for point labels, I
would not mind using LaTeX (If it's only about OpenType you cannot do
anything unless Asymptote gets extended, but even then you could use
XeTeX.)

There definitely are few exceptions and there's definitely an
extremely good feeling if you're aware that the tool uses ConTeXt in
the background ... but that's about all about it.

But the answer to your question about mkiv and dvi remains: no, it
won't be supported, unless someone provides sufficient funding or
writes amazing/extremely useful tools that could cope with XDV format
and do something useful with it. Feel free to search dev-luatex
archives for lenghty discussions about the issue.

Mojca
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