Thanks - it's at least useful to know what I needn't waste my time on!

I see that I shall also have to master ConTexT's commands for tables, though I hope they are customizable (as per my training at OUP a lifetime ago, I like a half-point rule at the beginning and end but a quarter-point rule between headings and the data). Plain (Xe)TeX's \halign command works only for that generally useless item, a table with only one column - if you try add an extra column the setting halts and one is presented with the false information that there is more than one instance of # between instances of & in the setup of the table. They lie!

I'm disappointed that I can't use \catcode = \active to do anything useful - I do often use that, particularly to fetch a character not in the typeface. For example, if I want a yogh and am obliged to use a particular typeface (because of house style for a journal or book series) that doesn't have the character, I would give in the file header in XeTeX:

\catcode"0292=\active

\defʒ{\yogh}

(I have \yogh defined as 'put \char"0292 here, grouped within {}, from Junicode'.) That allows me to keep the character ʒ in the input file and leave it to TeX to carry out the appropriate instruction whenever it encounters it.

This is prohibited in ConTexT, I find, but I'll have to learn a new way of achieving the same thing.

But I did promise not to bombard the list with silly newbie questions!

Best

John 🇪🇺 Слава Україні! 🇺🇦

On Mon, 16 Jun 2025 at 13:47, Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu> wrote:

On Sat, 14 Jun 2025, Hans Hagen wrote:

> On 6/14/2025 4:32 PM, Aditya Mahajan wrote:
> > On Sat, 14 Jun 2025, Wolfgang Schuster wrote:
> >
> >> The pstricks module isn't supported anymore and even in the past it worked
> >> only when you used postscript as output format.
> >
> > The pstricks module created a temp file, processed it using texexec, and
> > converted the generated ps to pdf using ps2pdf. You could automate it using
> > filter module (by processing the figures using latex!)
> >
> > Something along the lines of: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/462257/323
>
> Actually, there is a ps interpreter (m-escrito) that taco wrote a few decades
> ago when postscript was still hip and that I redid / optimized one decaded
> ago, which is still around .. you can run that file and get this tiger; i
> suppose I could actually optimize it a bit more and even integrate it with
> pstricks but i bet no one will revert back to pstricks so i never bothered.
> We keep it around for the fun of it and those who like to program in
> postscript.

Thanks. I'll check it.

But I agree. Postscript is a really esoteric programming language and IMO the pstricks wrapper not very elegant. So there is very little value in providing a wrapper around it.

Aditya
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