Bug#295205: metapost figures in xdvi with tex text

[frank@kuesterei.ch (Frank Küster)]

Hi Chris,

please keep the bugnumber addres in the Cc. I assume there is nothing
private in here; therefore I include it again, and also include the
xdvik maintainer.

Stefan, please have a look at http://bugs.debian.org/295205

Chris Walker <chrisw@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:

> I've tried compiling the new version of xdvik from upstream. It half
> solves the problem - perhaps the rest of tetex3 will provide the
> complete solution. It still doesn't display the text, 

That is the same in teTeX-3.0. I think it just does nothing for stuff
that it cannot display, and that is much better than any kind of crash
or unpredictable behavior. After all, xdvi is still a previewer. Or is
it supposed to display metapost output, Stefan?

> nor does it
> display a second picture on a page, but it seems to restart
> ghostscript for each page - which is progress.

Hm, of course I couldn't check this with your minimal example - in a
way, it was too minimal this time.

> If you can answer the following questions, it would be appreciated. 
>
> In tetex3, does the text display for you? 

No, it only shows a red frame as a placeholder.

> Do you get a stream of
> ghostscript error messages? In other words, has the problem been swept
> under the carpet by restarting ghostscript each time, or has it really
> been fixed?

No, I don't get the gs error messages any more. Still it seems that in a
way it's under the red framed carpet of not trying to display what it is
currently not able to display.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer