>>>>> "Angus" == Angus Leeming <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Angus> On Wednesday 09 October 2002 9:10 am, Rod Pinna wrote:
>> > Perhaps this'll do it ;-) > \converter epsi eps "if [ $$i != $$o
>> ]; then cp -f $$i $$o; > fi" ""
>>
>> Sorry all, I totally forgot to follow this up. Anyways, I tried
>> this with 122cvs (from a few days ago now) and it worked well for
>> me, as far as i can see.
>>
>> One question, what happens if $$i=$$o?
Angus> The converter returns an exit status of 0 (success) having done
Angus> nothing. Since you told me that LaTeX is perfectly happy with
Angus> your epsi files, then this should be sufficient to overcome any
Angus> pedantry on the part of LyX and just let things work.
OK, I think we have to stop and think a bit here. As far as I
understand the situation, the detection of epsi files has been added
to lyx 1.2.1 because there were some epsi files that dvips (or is it
convert?) could not digest easily. So the idea at this time was to use
eps2eps to strip out the preview from epsi files and make them work
effortlessly. However, there are problems with that
1/ I forgot to apply a patch from Herbert to define properly the epsi
converters in 1.2.1 (this is fixed now)
2/ since epsi and eps files have the same extension (.eps) the
converter will try to run eps2eps with the same name twice, which is a
very bad idea. And now, the solution proposed by angus does not count,
since we might as well get rid of epsi support.
Therefore, I see two solutions:
1/ get rid of the special epsi support. Has there been a thorough
examination of what kind of files create problems, and which programs
are affected (dvips? ghostscript?). If this is solved by upgrading
those programs, then I would consider that we should get rid of the
special epsi support and tell people to upgrade their faulty tools.
2/ if we _need_ epsi support, then we should fix the Converter class
so that it behaves correctly when the from and to formats have the
same extension. I see two ways
a) use a temporary file when invoking the converter and then rename
the file. This means though that the converter will overwrite the
original file, which may not be a good idea
b) let the converter modify the name of the output file, like
foo.eps1 instead of foo.eps. Dekel, is that feasible?
I am really surprised by the number of people who use this crappy epsi
format that nobody really needs. I guess this is related to the use
of windows tools to create the files. If we really get too annoyed by
this problem, I think the solution would be to tell people to just
generate eps files without previews.
I'd really want to get help on this, since this is one of the few
reasons that make me delay the 1.2.2 release.
JMarc
