[cairo-bugs] [Bug 23551] New: Wishlist: psfrag compatible postscript output

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23551

           Summary: Wishlist: psfrag compatible postscript output
           Product: cairo
           Version: 1.8.6
          Platform: All
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: enhancement
          Priority: low
         Component: postscript backend
        AssignedTo: ajohnson at redneon.com
        ReportedBy: rauferd at web.de
         QAContact: cairo-bugs at cairographics.org
                CC: rauferd at web.de


psfrag is a tool used by LaTeX users to subsitute text in figures with
formatted LaTeX text, equations or anything else. psfrag relies on the
text being exported as one word, because it simply searches and replaces
»tags« in the ascii file describing the figure.
Since cairo substitutes text by glyphs one character at a time, includes
subsets of the fonts used and uses unicode notation even for purely ascii
text, output produced by Cairo can't be parsed by psfrag.

A typical postscipt command, as psfrag expects it:
> (Text) show

Cairo instead does it like this:
> (...)
> Encoding 1 /uni0054 put
> Encoding 2 /uni0065 put
> Encoding 3 /uni0078 put
> Encoding 4 /uni0074 put
> (...) + 200 Lines of inclueded glyphs

I agree that your approach has many advantages , but perhaps it would be
possible to introduce some compatability option to export text as-is.

psfrag is a very powerful tool and it would be pity if the output of
all applications build on top of Cairo couldn't be used together with it.
For more information on psfrag, see:
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/psfrag.html

I stumbled upon this, since the upcoming version ( 0.47) of Inkscape
(the popular vector graphics editor, see: inkscape.org) will support
Cairo only for exporting to ps, eps, pdf. When I tested this version,
its export didn't work with my LaTeX documents anymore.


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