On May 4, 2012, at 1:26 PM, Apostolos Syropoulos wrote: >> >> Don't you feel yourself in a loop? If they patch it, they apparently >> want to use it and if they want to use it, it is not useless for them >> because if it were useless, they would not use it and thus they would >> have no reason to patch it. >> > > > No! The problem is that people should start saying that certain parts > of the old TeX world are irrelevant and so they should not be part > of any TeX distribution. For example, on a set of recently compiled > binaries I see the following: > > apostolo@nadya>> ./tex > This is TeX, Version 3.1415926 (TeX Live 2012/dev) > **^D > ! End of file on the terminal... why? > apostolo@nadya>> ./pdftex > This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.3-1.40.13 (TeX Live 2012/dev) > restricted \write18 enabled. > **^C > > > The question is: why keeping the tex binary when the pdftex binary can > do the same things? If you throw away the tex binary, then you can > get rid of most useless binaries that manipulate DVI files. >
Howdy, I hesitate jumping into this discussion but one reason to retain tex->dvi->ps->pdf is that pdftex can't include eps figures by default. That said, recent versions of pdftex using the graphicx package can use epstopdf (which uses Ghostscript?) to convert eps->pdf on the fly unless you have your system set to ``paranoid'' mode. Good Luck, Herb Schulz (herbs at wideopenwest dot com) -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex