Bug#434706: texlive-latex-base: color package uses black for figure captions and page numbers

[Florent Rougon <f.rougon@free.fr>]

Hi,

Ryo Furue <furue@hawaii.edu> wrote:

> If the original LaTeX source uses the "color" package, "xdvi -rv"
> shows figure captions and page numbers in black, which is invisible in
> default colors.  I confirmed they are black by

Frankly, I doubt upstream would want to workaround that (I say
"workaround", because a proper fix would be *very* difficulut, I think).

Reasons:
  - TeX knowns *nothing* about colors, and neither do DVI files; the
    color you get in your DVI is not really part of the DVI format, it
    is inserted by PostScript specials, which are extension strings for
    things not handled by the DVI format, such as, yes, color handling.

  - xdvi renders these PostScript specials by calling GhostScript,
    AFAIK, so I suppose that the result, including the precise colors
    used, is a black box as far as xdvi is concerned;

  - a proper fix would be to retrieve the color information from
    GhostScript's output and fiddle with it so that it is displayed
    "correctly" in reverse video. So, when your document says
    \color{brown} and gs renders a few pixels in brown, xdvi should just
    stop to show and say: "Hey, guys, I'm smarter than everyone of you;
    I'll pick green!!!". Hmmm.

-- 
Florent