Hello,
I have started cleaning things for dvips(1) (to be included in kerTeX)
and I'd like to have feedback about people's usage of it.
Since my favorite engineering tool is called /dev/null, I have started
with the following principles:
- There was support for emtex and tpic, and a search on the Web seems to
indicate that these are obsolete: removed. Are some of you still using
these things?
- As for TeX/METAFONT, I aim for pure C89 and will remove any system
dependant stuff. For example, dvips(1) has not to deal with a spool
system etc. : it creates a file. So now, since it can't act purely as a
filter (input must be seekable), output is sent to stdout and users
redirect this wherever they want.
- There was support for embedded commands calling system(3). Either you
know what you are doing, and you can preprocess or postprocess the
files. Or you don't know what "you" are doing, because it is an alien
file and you don't know exactly what is in. Same treatment: I have
removed support for embedded system commands.
- dvips(1) is configurable by several different ways. So many that
I've discovered them working on it. I want dvips(1) to only have
one configuration file, called: "dvips.cnf" (and not "config.ps"
since it's not Postscript instructions), the file being searched,
like for TeX/METAFONT, by a PATH env variable, meaning adjusting
the path you can control what file is found first.
- under Plan9, you know what is the character encoding. This is not true
on other systems. Are there still ebcdic computers on run that may use
dvips(1) ?
Cheers,
--
Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
http://www.kergis.com/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89 250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C
