[OS X TeX] Sierra 10.12.4

[Herbert Schulz]

> On Apr 3, 2017, at 12:03 PM, George Gratzer <gratzer at me.com> wrote:
> 
> Herb,
> 
> Why not then use Illustrator ot TikZ?
> 
> George
> 
> 
> 
>> On Apr 3, 2017, at 11:16 AM, Herbert Schulz <herbs at wideopenwest.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> On Apr 3, 2017, at 10:06 AM, George Gratzer <gratzer at me.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Dick,
>>> 
>>> I spend a number of hours a day with TeXShop. The papers I write contain a large number of illustrations (Adobe Illustrator). I have no problem with MacOS 10.12.4.
>>> 
>>> George
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> On Apr 3, 2017, at 10:50 AM, Richard M. Koch <koch at uoregon.edu> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Folks,
>>>> 
>>>> Further investigation suggests that the situation with 10.12.4 isn't as bad as I reported..
>>>> 
>>>> I had three bug reports. The two that concerned me most suggested that Beamer failed with 10.12.4. But it turns out that these users included pstricks in their Beamer source, and then compiled with pdflatex. Of course pstricks requires compiling with Latex --> dvips --> ps2pdf. This worked fine for them.
>>>> 
>>>> If you include pstricks and then compile with pdflatex in 10.12.4,  the resulting pdf file will hang Preview, TeXShop, and Skim. All three use Apple's PDFKit to render pdf files, and this is a new 10.12.4 bug in PDFKit. But now that you know the cause, you can work around it if it attacks.
>>>> 
>>>> The final report is entirely different and serious, but apparently isolated. A user sent several documents with many illustrations. Some of these illustrations cause PDFKit to begin producing blank pages when scrolled on 10.12.4,
>>>> and in some cases to crash. This has also been reported to Apple. but only one person has run into the problem.
>>>> 
>>>> Dick Koch
>> 
>> Howdy,
>> 
>> I don't think illustrations (even eps --- modern pdflatex can convert file.eps->file-eps-converted-to.pdf on the fly) are a problem. It's pstricks that can give the problem when compiling with pdflatex.
>> 
>> I'm actually intrigued with the (limited?) ability of pstricks use with pdflatex using the [pdf] option as long as you use --shell-escape. You learn something new every day!
>> 
>> Good Luck,
>> 
>> Herb Schulz
>> (herbs at wideopenwest dot com)

Howdy,

I'm not quite sure what you mean here.

The tikz package is very careful about how it creates the illustration so that they won't be incompatible with pdf files when compiling under pdflatex. The pstricks package will add ``Specials'' to the file that are incompatible with the pdf specification (pdf only supports a sub-set of PostScript commands). At least I think that's what happens.

As far as using Illustrator vs tikz it seems to me that tikz lends itself to algorithmic descriptions of diagrams while Illustrator is better for more free hand types of illustrations.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)