Re: [AUCTeX] pstricks and TeX-PDF-mode

[Joost Kremers]

On Di, Okt 13 2015, Mandar Mitra <address@hidden> wrote:
> I use xetex as my default TeX-engine, and it seems to handle pstricks without 
> any problems, but style/pstricks.el contains the following:
>
>     780    (unless (member "pst-pdf" TeX-active-styles)
>     781      (TeX-PDF-mode-off))
>
> So whenever I use the pstricks package, I have to turn TeX-PDF-mode on
> by hand.

I usually put `TeX-PDF-mode: t` to my local variable block to avoid
this.

Which, BTW, reminds me of a question I've often been wondering (but
never got round to asking here): AUCTeX inserts a local variable block
into a new TeX file to set the mode and the TeX-master. Is it possible
to customise this block, or is it hard-coded?

Mmm, ok, so I've looked at the source a bit and it seems to be
hardcoded... So I guess my question becomes: would it be possible to
allow adding custom variables to the local variable block that gets
inserted into new files?

> Irrelevant aside: xelatex handles included eps, pdf and jpg images,
> UTF-8 text, and as far as I can tell pstricks so much more easily than
> pdflatex. Are there some downsides to it as well? I.e., is pdflatex
> better than xelatex at doing anything?

Well, I have, on one or two rare occasions, come across pstricks code
that XeLaTeX didn't handle correctly. It's very rare, at least in my use
case, but it does happen.

More importantly, though, processing pstricks code with XeLaTeX is IME
much slower than with pdflatex, which can get very annoying if you have
lot of pstricks images. For that reason, I tend to put pstricks code in
separate files which I process separately and include into the main
document with \includegraphics. (You need to crop the pdfs for that, but
TeXLive comes with a utility called pdfcrop that can do that. It's easy
to add an option for it to TeX-command-list.)

This approach has its pros and cons, but if you ever end up needing to
submit your work to a Word-only shop, you already have the images as
separate files as pdfs or easily converted, high-res pngs.



-- 
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments