Re: [NTG-context] bug in minimals: dvipdfmx.dll not found

On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 6:52 PM, Yue Wang wrote:

On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 10:25 PM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

...

On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 1:29 PM, Yue Wang wrote:

...

Mojca:

Hello Yue Wang,

Thanks a lot for your reports.

...

I think you forgot to put the windows version of dvipdfmx.dll in the minimals tree.

Mea culpa! I fixed that. I didn't notice that one needs dll and nobody has complained so far.

Well, I use an old release of context (august) and it seems to have it. but after upgrade to the latest version, something broken here.

Interesting. (No piece of code in the minimals did change in that respect, at least none that I would know of.) Maybe the old dvipdfmx.exe did not require the dll file to be present?

...

Out of curiosity: how do you use it? Does ConTeXt work OK with it at all? That binary is on the shortlist of being put to a special section that one would need to install as a separate module (option in mtx-update.lua for example), so I would like to know how/when it is still used. Also: that binary is badly supported in tikz for ConTeXt for example. So it is nice to know how much one needs to invest in trying to keep compatibility with those engines.

Well, I should say it works in some cases: especially for documents with no hyperlinks and metapost graphics (and no hz features enabled too). And it is fun to use it for CID font embedding (it is the most popular tex driver in Asia since it have good support for CJK font. in fact luatex also use dvipdfmx code for CID font embedding).

However, hyperlinks are always point to the wrong place, and MPGraphics are usually in the wrong place too. I send a bug report to Hans, but it seems not fixed yet. (Also, focus=standard is not fixed yet. it is still higher or lower than the content it points to). These are not dvipdfmx specific problems. XeTeX->xdvipdfmx has those problems too.

Does XeTeX also place MP graphics to the wrong place? (I still use mostly pdfTeX for documents that do not require any programming or foreign fonts, so I did not notice weird behaviour yet.)

When I use teTeX 3.0 (context version 2005.1.30 pdfetex 1.21), many dvi specific features work well. One important reason is that ConTeXt use dvi as default output at that time. So when there is a bug, it will be easy to get report from users. However, pdf became the default output in the late 2005, and after four years of development, dvi features support are somewhat buggy now.

That's why I wonder if dvi-based workflows work at all. I've seen some issues and none of theme were likely to be fixed. How different is it when you work with dvipdfmx compared to xetex or luatex?

BTW, the latest dvipdfmx driver supports metafun, as announced on the official web page of dvipdfmx.

That's nice :) Mojca