dvisvgm needs rebuild to support ghostscript 10

Jonathan Fine jfine2358 at gmail.com
Wed Nov 30 19:32:13 CET 2022


Hi

I'm very pleased to see the progress made on this list, regarding the
rebuild of dvisvgm to support Ghostscript 10. I'm sure many are grateful to
all who contributed. As a friend says, working together we can make things
better.

By good chance, tomorrow's TeX Hour "Make TeX Small Again" is relevant to
this thread. Sergio Callegari, the original poster, has told us that his
use case is importing already typeset material into LibreOffice (for use in
slides, for example).

In the following post from 2019 to tex.sx the use case is creating
standalone SVG by using tikz, and the failure is improved security in
GhostScript (as is the present failure).
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/521351/dvisvgm-dvi-to-svg-issue

Here are two elements of the relevance of "Make TeX Small". The first is
that TikZ is a lovely fairly small TeX application, that can be used
standalone for technical illustration in both PDF and (with for example
dvisvgm) SVG. I think many people who don't know TeX would use TikZ as an
illustration package, particularly if it were packaged as a small
stand-alone app (say 50MB if possible).

The second is for testing compatibility of dvisvgm with new versions of
Ghostscript. If a packaged TikZ app were only 50MB, then it becomes much
more practical to incorporate this testing into a continuous integration
environment.

The third (an off-by-one error) is that a small stand-alone app for TikZ
would make it much easier for people to share, edit and reprocess  the
source for TikZ graphics.

If you're interested in the TeX Hour tomorrow all are welcome. Details are
here:
https://texhour.github.io/2022/12/01/less-more-make-tex-small/

By the way, if you use TikZ you might also be interested in the approach
taken by:
https://vega.github.io/vega/
https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/
https://altair-viz.github.io

Also by the way, I've just found this related question
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/559640/making-dvisvgm-and-ghostscript-from-mactex-talk-to-each-other

wishing you happy TeXing

Jonathan
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