Re: [Groff] Why are pic pictures hanging at the TeX-baseline?

[Hartmut Henkel]

Hi Egil,

with separate E-Mail I send you a set of test files with inline and
figure-style inclusion of gpic pictures in comparison with MetaPost
figure inclusion. I believe that a corresponding modification of gpic
would definitely be the right way to do it. It is just a two-line change
in tex.cc. The \box\graph then has a height, but depth is zero, as seems
to be usual in the TeX environment.

And then you might throw out the special remark about vertical spaces in
TeX mode from the man page. After the modification it would be
consistent and there is nothing special to mention any more in TeX mode.

More below...

On 29 Nov 2002, Egil Kvaleberg wrote:

> On Fri, 2002-11-29 at 02:52, Hartmut Henkel wrote:
>
> > in the output from pic -t (TeX-Mode) the pictures are _hanging_ at
> > the text baseline, when included into a TeX document. I believe this
> > is not the usual way in TeX. E. g. pictures included in LaTeX by
> > \includegraphics{} are _standing_ on the baseline. Is there a
> > rationale behind the pic way of doing?
>
> By the way, does this means that content produced by gpic cannot be
> placed within a \begin{figure} ... \end{figure}

It works, but the vertical placement is different to the TeX placement,
as you see in the pdf file.

> Would it be natural that support for that would be natively in gpic?

Yes.

> I have been working with gpic to properly include support postscript
> and raster graphics. This is working in groff, but I need help in
> testing the support for LaTex (using \includegraphics)
>
> Can you assist with this?

Yes, definitely! Send what you have or give a pointer where to find it.
Here I am using pic from groff 1.18.1 from sources, on a debian woody
PC. But I am no groff user.

> More information about the image support in gpic can (for the time
> being) be found in the file pic.pdf at ftp.kvaleberg.no
>
> Egil

And here is some TODO-list, no not really a TODO list, as this would
mean MUCH work :-) I just assembled it from what I have seen, don't mind
:-) ...

* tpic \specials (no pic topics at all, but related): Support for real
Bezier curves, and linecap and linejoin parameters, as senseful minimum,
like in PS and PDF. But the tpic \specials seem to be sooo obsolete,
weird (no defined namespace) and who would be caring for their
standardization?

* pic: linecap and linejoin parameters, to get rid of the uniformly
rounded drawings, so to add crispiness in viewing. And a command for
real Bezier curves, in addition to the splines starting/ending straight
(which are still a clever concept as they can handle arrows at the line
ends well; seen in Kernighan's example).

* pic: dashed, dotted ellipses (I have tried this in common.cc. It
works, but the -z dots are expensive in TeX and the dots without -z are
horribly expensive. Maybe better to implement the ellipse right-away in
PS/PDF, and forget about tpic.

* pic: A combined PS/PDF/dvipdfm output mode. This should be rather
simple.

Greetings Hartmut


------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr.-Ing. Hartmut Henkel
In den Auwiesen 6, D-68723 Oftersheim, Germany
E-Mail: address@hidden
http://www.circuitwizard.de
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