[Therion] texlive support in therion

[Wookey]

Hi guys,

I have a (now rather old) wishlist bug #356368 from you kindly
requesting therion support texlive.

I would be very pleased to do this but feel that my tex competence is
insufficient to decide what dependencies are needed, and whether and
other changes should be made. So I am asking for help/advice.

Therion is probably an unusual tex user in that it largely doesn't
use it for text. It uses metapost to draw caves and pdftex to spit out
PDF files. There is some text processing in the labelling and legends,
where text macros can be included. See http://therion.speleo.sk/2D.php
for some idea of the output.

It also has an unconventional layout in terms of tex integration.
Early releases included the metafont and tex files in the usual place
in the distribution but this caused problems on non-debian platforms
(particualrly windows and mac) so now the macros are included directly
into the therion binary and squirted into tex/metapost by the
program at runtime. This is not a very Debian way of doing things, but
it makes installation easy on all platforms so I am a little reluctant
to try and revert it all. I suspect none of this makes any difference
to texlive support but I thought I should explain how things operate.

Please continue the cross-post to the therion list if you have any
'does it use foo' type questions, as I probably don't really know.

If someone could download the source and take a quick look to tell us
which bits of texlive we should be depending on, or make suggestions
from the above info, that would be very helpful, and I will include it
in the 0.4.0 release I am just about to put in experimental.

You can have a preview of it here:
svn checkout svn://wookware.org/therion/ 

Although for the purposes of texlive compatibility I think the
existing 0.3.10 in debian testing will be just as good.

Thanx for your help.

Wookey
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work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/                 play: http://wookware.org/
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