Bug#2104: dvips doesn't provide color

["Susan G. Kleinmann" <sgk@sgk.tiac.net>]

In any effort to minimize the length of the original bug report
I hadn't described in detail the contents of the test string "Some text."
It turns out to have been significant, because what I'd tested was not
a simple text string, but a small table.

Further testing shows that color output *can be* produced, as
long as a color command is used *inside* of a table environment.

In other words,

this produces no color:        |   this colors the text in the table
                               |   (but leaves the page white):
-------------------------------|-------------------------------------------
\pagecolor[named]{GreenYellow} |   \pagecolor[named]{GreenYellow}
\textcolor[named]{Salmon}{     |   \begin{table}
\begin{table}                  |      \textcolor[named]{Salmon}{Some text.}
  Some text.                   |   \end{table}
\end{table}                    |
}                              |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

If some color command is used before the table occurs, then both the
page background and the table are colored.  For example, this
produces a colored page background and colored table:

\pagecolor[named]{GreenYellow}
\colorbox[named]{Salmon}{}
\begin{table}
    \textcolor[named]{Salmon}{Some text.}
\end{table}

However, the colorbox (in this case just a block with no text in it)
comes out *below* the table on the page.  That is, there seems to be little
control over the vertical spacing of colored table material and plain text.

I suspect this is somehow a problem with the color package, and not with
the Debian distribution of it.  The problem with reporting it in the
TeX developers' hierarchy is that the latest release of the color package is
said only to work with the December 1995 release of LaTeX-2e, and not with
earlier versions, such as the one currently available in the Debian
distribution (June 1, 1995).  The bug reported here may or may not
be apparent in the most uptodate versions of these packages.

Susan Kleinmann
sgk@sgk.tiac.net