RE: [Axiom-developer] hyperlinked algebra

[C Y]

--- Bill Page <address@hidden> wrote:

> On December 7, 2005 8:43 PM Cliff wrote:
> > 
> > --- Tim Daly (root) wrote:
> > > i've hacked src/doc/endpaper.pamphlet to add hyperlinks.
> > > most of the links go to catdef.spad.dvi because they are
> > > categories that live there. i don't know how to implement 
> > > #tags in latex yet.
> > 
> > What do you mean by tags?  Is that a way to refer to 
> > specific points in a document?
> 
> Yes. Works in HTML and PDF (Acrobat). Maybe some dvi?

Well, my units tex file has a way to create hyperref targets within a
document.  I'm not sure how to open a DIFFERENT file and go to a target
in that file, or even if acroread/xdvi support that, but it might be
doable - I'll take a look.

> > I'll try to build this file - I wasn't aware pstricks could
> > do hyperlinked diagrams.  Can a hyperlinked pdf be created?
> > I know there is a pst-pdf package for pstricks but I don't
> > know how good it is.
> 
> Yes, apparently you can create hyperlinked pdf files this way.
> See:
> 
> http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/book--main--1/Endpaper2
> 
> This is Tim's revised endpaper file with some additional
> options specified for the hyperref package that allow it to
> generate hyperlinks using dvipdfm.
> 
>
\usepackage[dvipdfm,final,colorlinks=true,pdfstartview=FitH]{hyperref}

We're going to run into trouble here, I think.  So far, if I supply pdf
specific options to hyperref in tetex 3.0+, it's going to perforce
compile with pdfetex instead of latex.  This is intended behavior
apparently, since according to what I have read pdfetex can usually
generate better pdf documents than a ps->pdf or dvi->pdf conversion
can.

However, it seems that postscript specific packages like pstricks are
going to cause us some trouble here.  I tried to install pst-pdf and
build endpaper.pamphlet (the one in the email) with pdflatex, and it
was a disaster.  I'm not sure whether it was because my setup was wrong
or what (being off the net slows the debugging process).

If dvipdfm is really a direct dvi->pdf converter, maybe there is some
way to generate dvi diagrams of pstrick figures and use it to convert
them to pdf for insertion by pdflatex, but that sounds frighteningly
hackish to me.   
  
> > If pstricks can indeed do all that we want with fancy linking
> > and diagrams it might be a better target than XYpic - there
> > exist some fairly sophisticated graphing routines for 
> > pstricks,
> 
> I am not sure why, but I do not see any lines connecting the
> nodes in the diagram. Is something still missing from the file?

Confirmed - I see the same thing.  I would say there is a fairly high
order of probability that the conversion routines are not up to
producing the lines in pdf.

If we are going to pursue this route, I would recommend two things. 
The first one is to contact the folks involved with LaTeX, TeTeX, and
other TeX distribution builders and find out what the future holds for
standard TeX tools - in particular whether we should be targeting
pdfetex or using dvipdfm.  The second is to talk to the pdfetex,
pstrick/pst-pdf, and XYpic authors and see what can be done to improve
the output we are getting.  Even XYpic, which successfully created a
with-lines diagram in pdf using pdfetex, renders that diagram very
slowly in Acroread so I have a feeling we are either up against a
limitation of pdf or (more likely) there is something suboptimal going
on with the pdf translation.  This can't be a very common usage of
LaTeX so we may be in uncharted (or at least unoptimized) waters here. 
If the authors of the latex packages are interested in working with us
we might be able to break new ground both for Axiom and for TeX.

Of course I'm not TeX expert, but if this course seems wise I'm willing
to try and locate the appropriate contacts and see if progress can be
made.

Cheers,
Cliff

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