(mgp-users 00076) Re: remarks against 1.04a

[Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>]

> > One of the nice things of mgp is that it is mostly self-contained
> > (except perhaps for postscript and the lack of "embedded" fonts...
...
> I haven't look closely at mgpembed yet.  But I thought it should replace the
> '%image "b.eps"' by the uuencoded EPS file, so it remains portable in this
> case (provided EPS files are displayable everywhere).  Anyway, the possibility
> to include maths is compulsory for lots of people, and it would be a good idea
> to provide a good TeX support for simple equations.

unfortunately mgpembed does not run the command to _generate_ b.eps so
the include will fail.
In any case i fully agree on the importance of having math support, and
TeX is the best way to achieve it without reinventing the wheel.

I was only suggesting that we provide some preprocessing phase
for cases like this (where the %filter input is static) so that we can
ship around pre-processed presentation files which do not require TeX
(nor, possibly, ghostscript, but that is a minor problem).

> While we are at EPS files, I noticed that the '%image "a.eps" 300x200' scales
> well on the screen (or X window), but it fails (to scale) on the output of
> mgp2ps.

printing support is extremely weak in my opinion. IN august Mark
Handley sent some patches which support printing using an alternative
approach (through an option passed to mgp). I cannot comment on the
result but for sure Mark's approach is much easier to maintain being all
the code that process a given directive in the same place.

Volunteers are always welcome...

	luigi