Pstricks and Asymptote

16 Nov 2009

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 23:57, Curiouslearn wrote:
> Thanks everyone for replying.
>
> Mojca, in case you read this, can you please let me know what the
> status on asymptote is.

I read it***, but I already forgot what the state was. I had to find
the thread where I suggested a few changes, but the main people
involved were Michail and Aditya. (Those who knew what was going on
behind the scenes.)

(***I ofter skip threads where no "hot" keywords appear in subject.
You can CC me if you don't get any answer from me for some reasonable
time.)

>From what I remember (Michail, please correct me if I'm wrong) and
apart from what Aditya wrote:
- you can always use standalone asymptote files to generate figures,
for example:

settings.tex="context";
texpreamble("\usetypescript[iwona]");
texpreamble("\usetypescript[antykwa-torunska]");
label("$A$",0,N,font("iwona"));
label("$A$",0,S,font("antykwa")+red);

- Aditya described the integrated graphics (\startASY ... \stopASY)
pretty well - in a quick-and-dirty way it can be done easily, but more
difficult to do it properly. If it would help you a lot to have a
quick-and-dirty solution for that, let us know. Now that TeX Live
includes asymptote it is much easier for everyone to test it.

- Michail was working on 3D support (that is making 3D text out of tex
labels), but I have no idea what the status of that is.

> Alan, the tikz module does not work with MKIV. From what I have read
> before, it seems it will not unless the creator of tikz makes some
> changes to tikz package so that it works with Context. I am not sure
> how likely that is.

In past Till has *always* fixed any bug reported, but I have not heard
from him since March (neither as reply to off-list requests nor any
response to the mailing list).

> Thomas or someone else can you please confirm that the pstricks module
> works with MKIV. Also, where I can find the module? It is not there
> with the other third party modules.

It's part of ConTeXt core, but the problem is that one needs a
separate TeX run (PSTricks only works with tex->dvips->ps2pdf and that
is awfully slow). I cannot tell you if it works with mkiv - probably
not, but I can only tell you that the number of users is limiting
towards zero and with that number of users you are almost on your own.
I would say that tikz is much better in almost any respect, but then
... I have no idea why Till has been so silent for such a long time.

Mojca

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