bug#44578: AW: Future of EPS (was Re: bug#45894: Bug report for preview-latex)

[Bruckmann, Tobias]

Dear Ikumi,

first, I would like to thank you for taking the time to reflect the
situation and to give me some insight.

I would be perfectly fine with a purely PDF-based toolchain, and as I use
Inkscape as a graphics editor, that would be no problem. My only requirement
is the ability to replace text in graphics by LaTeX expressions, which is
why I use pstool.

(Well, to be honest, as I am in the middle of preparing a larger document
and as dozens of graphics are already prepared for pstool replacements, I
would be in favor of finalizing this single project using the pstool
approach...)

Are you aware of any approach to do these LaTeX text replacements in PDF
graphics already today?

I will try the TikZ format in between.

Thanks,
Tobias

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Ikumi Keita <ikumi@ikumi.que.jp> 
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 2. September 2021 09:01
An: Bruckmann, Tobias <tobias.bruckmann@uni-due.de>
Cc: 45894@debbugs.gnu.org; 44578@debbugs.gnu.org
Betreff: Future of EPS (was Re: bug#45894: Bug report for preview-latex)

Dear Tobias,

>>>>> "Bruckmann, Tobias" <tobias.bruckmann@uni-due.de> writes:
> 6 months ago we had the conversation below, and as Mr. Kastrup decided 
> not to care for the issue without getting paid, I wanted to ask 
> whether this bug is still on the list of the auctex team.

This bug is registered in Bug Tracker of AUCTeX:
https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/pkgreport.cgi?which=pkg&data=auctex

So perhaps someone might pick it up and try to resolve it in future;
However, I think that hope is very weak. In my view, the (La)TeX ecosystem
is moving rapidly towards PDF centric realm with respect to the graphic
format and EPS is already considered (implicitly) as semi-obsolete. In a
decade, EPS would be totally obsolete as (La)TeX graphic format.

You wrote
> - Most scientific works use vector EPS graphics.
before. If your tool supports only EPS as the format for outputs, my
recommendation is to ask the developer to update it to support other format.
If I remember correctly, many scientific tools which consider
interoperability with LaTeX recently supports TikZ code as export format. Is
it difficult to do so for your tool?

> The combination of pstool and pdfLaTeX seems to be the most promising 
> approach to me to join these points in one toolchain.

For the reason described above, I don't think it's promising, at least for
usage with (La)TeX.

> So there's no pathway and this toolchain is dead forever?

The answer depends whether the developer of your tool adheres to EPS or not,
I think.

Regards,
Ikumi Keita

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