[OS X TeX] fragmaster, dvips and pdflatex problem

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 26 juin 06 à 12:56, Michael Williams a écrit :

> On Mon, Jun 26, 2006 at 07:33:02AM +1000, Ross Moore wrote:
>
>>  c.  psfrag  is essentially a dead-end, so far as
>>     future development is concerned, since it requires
>>     programming features of the PostScript language.
>>     As such, there cannot be an easy PDF equivalent.
>>
>>     Thus it will probably never be useful for adding
>>     labels requiring characters from (un-subsetted)
>>     OpenType fonts.
>
> Right now this is not a problem, but it may become a showstopper  
> for me
> in the future, so it would be good to migrate to something other than
> psfrag (to which I have no particular attachment).

Publishers generally require figure files to work as stand-alone  
files, not requiring interaction with any external software (here TeX  
and psfrag) or file (here the .tex input file) to be ready for public  
consumption (read here: contain full annotations and lettering).  
Which is another showstopper for psfrag.

Plus: in my experience, tags used in psfrag should generally be one- 
letter long, not more. Depending on the exact DVI processor that is  
used (for example dvips or Textures), the letters composing the tag  
may be separated in the PS output (by spaces or PostScript  
instructions). In that case, psfrag does no longer see the tag and  
fails.

In short: I recommend against psfrag.

Bruno Voisin

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