[pdftex] pdftex line-drawing specials

[White, George]

If your PostScript specials do any calculations they won't translate
to pdf.   

Have you looked into metapost?  Hans Hagan has done a lot of work
with metapost and pdftex, including metapost support for the latex
graphics packages.   Metapost output is PostScript, but in a form that
translates reasonably directly to pdf. http://www.pragma-ade.com/pragma-ade/
has extensive documentation (mostly using ConTeXt, but much of the the 
metapost code can be used in LaTeX). 

 
-----Original Message-----
From: Avery Andrews
To: pdftex at tug.org
Sent: 1/30/01 8:03 PM
Subject: [pdftex] pdftex line-drawing specials

Hello,

I've presently got some postscript specials (for dvips) for drawing
lines and arrows for linguistics diagrams (originally by Emma Pease,
with some
enhancements by me), and from what little I've learned about the pdf
format it seems like it might not be too difficult to produce a pdf
version of these for use with pdftex; it would be very helpful if
somebody could point me gently in the right direction for how to do
this, at least two things I think I need to know being:

 a) how to put a pdf special into a latex document, similarly to a
    postscript special

 b) a manual of pdf commands.

I've guessed that replacing \special{ps: with \special{pdf: would be
the answer to (a), and that seems to work but then the actual specials
crash because acrobat doesn't like the `@beginspec' commands that these
specials start with.

It's been a long time since I've seriously messed with this kind of
thing, so I've likely forgotten important stuff.

 Thanks
  Avery.Andrews at anu.edu.au

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