New on CTAN: pdftricks2

CTAN Announcements ctan-ann at dante.de
Sat Nov 17 13:14:36 CET 2012


Christian Reibiger submitted the

  pdftricks

package


Summary description: A LaTeX package to use PSTricks code with PDF output.
License type: gpl

Announcement text:
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This package provides automatization facilities to use the pstricks package with 
pdflatex. It is intended to be of easy use and interoperability with latex and 
pdflatex, namely both show the same result.

The pdftricks2 package circumvents the problem that pdflatex can not handle 
ps-code by writing an extra latex file that contains only the figure. This files 
are converted to dvi to ps and then to pdf. Finally the resulting pdf-pictures 
are included in the text as a graphic. This process can be handled automatically 
by the package but it needs to have the possibility to execute system commands 
(start pdflatex with option--enable-write18 or -shell-escape). If you do not 
want to grant this rights you still can use the package but you have to execute 
a shell script the package writes yourself to produce the pdf-pictures. In this 
case you have to run pdftex again to include the pictures in your document.

The package tries to show the same results when used with latex as for pdflatex. 
However there are some side effects of using this package as described in the 
documentation.

Although this package is inspired by the pdftricks package, it is coded from 
scratch. The pdftricks package has some flaws that are circumvented by 
pdftricks2. For example you have to gather all configurations you need for your 
pictures in one place. Furthermore it is not possible to share configuration 
code between your figures and the main text. Also the pdftricks package does not 
use the provided limits of the figure you produce but rather assumes it fits on 
a standard page and cuts everything away that does not look like being 
important.

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This package is located at 
   http://mirror.ctan.org/graphics/pdftricks2
.  More information is at
   http://www.ctan.org/pkg/pdftricks2
(if the package is new it may take a day for that information to 
appear).  We are supported by the TeX Users Group http://www.tug.org .  
Please join a users group; see http://www.tug.org/usergroups.html .

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Thanks for the upload.

For the CTAN Team
  Rainer Schöpf


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