[Xy-pic] New LaTeX package: xypdf

Daniel Müllner nospamplease at stanford.edu
Tue Apr 13 21:06:16 CEST 2010


Dear Ross, dear Kris,

thank you very much for your favorable comments on xypdf! As Kris
mentioned a possible 3.8 release of Xy-pic, I will be honored if you
make my PDF routines the default. You can count on my help with
integrating xypdf in case you undertake a new revision. As for
stability, I am currently waiting which problems or bugs users report
and then hopefully have a somewhat final package soon.

For the simple fact that e-TeX's \dimexpr primitive introduces a good
division, the arithmetic is much easier to do today than eleven years
ago when you coded Xy-pic. (That said, it is still an effort to
implement numerical algorithms in fixed point arithmetic with only the
four elementary operations available. But I am aware that TeX was not
made for that, and we are moving along the boundary of its numerical
capabilities.)

Maybe we can get rid of the circle and dashes fonts entirely? I also
think that some of the arithmetic can be simplified substantially and
maybe speeded up, thanks to \dimexpr. But that would indeed require a
major revision of the Xy-pic code.

Best regards,

Daniel

--
http://math.stanford.edu/~muellner



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