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

[Ryo Furue <furue@hawaii.edu>]

Hi Florent,

Thank you for your detailed discussion.

| > 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.
[. . .]
| 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;

Hmm . . . It seems to me that a possible solution is to add a
"default foreground color" (DFC) to the protocol.  The LaTeX color
package would insert a special saying "put this text in the DFC"
instead of saying "put this text in black."  Then, xdvi, dvips,
or dvipdf would substitute DFC with its current foreground color
before it asks GhostScript to render the text.  I think this scheme
would count as a "proper fix" rather than a "workaround".

Regards,
Ryo