Re: dvi2ps

[Atsuhito Kohda <kohda@pm.tokushima-u.ac.jp>]

Hi Barry,

On Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:32:23 -0400, Barry deFreese wrote:

> dvi2ps is the last hold-out to drop vflib2.  I have created 
> a patch to make dvi2ps use vflib3 (which needs more testing 
> from someone more knowledgeable than me).

Great!

> However, dvi2ps also has an RC bug as it still uses freetype1.  
> I have worked on this quite a bit and not even the freetype 
> folks seem to be able to help me much.

As I'm not a programmer, I can't help you here.

> texlive-base-bin has dvips.  Is that a sufficient replacement 
> for dvi2ps?  Should dvi2ps just be removed?  It's only rdepends 
> are the dvi2ps-fontdata packages, of which dvi2ps-fontdata-ja 
> seems to be the most widely used.  Is dvipsk-ja a decent 
> replacement for that?

As a Japanese TeX user, I'd like to say it is a decent
replacement for dvi2ps to some extent.  
Further, if I'm allowed to say my private opinion, Japanese 
TeX is changing drastically these days.  It is mainly for 
unicode support.
In this point of view, dvipsk-ja in Debian is already a bit
obsolete to some extent.  I tend to use a private version of 
dvipsk-ja which supports unicode recently (key words: ptexlive
uptex e-ptex etc.).
Or there is XeTeX from another direction.

> Does anyone have any opinions?  I'm happy to help wherever 
> I can but I would like to at least get vflib2 dropped.

I've asked an upstream author how he thinks of this issue
and if I get any response, I'll report it here.

Thanks for your effort.

Regards,			2008-4-18(Fri)

-- 
 Debian Developer - much more I18N of Debian
 Atsuhito Kohda <kohda AT debian.org>
 Department of Math., Univ. of Tokushima