On Sun, Sep 22, 2002 at 10:50:51AM +0100, Robin Fairbairns wrote:

> > I am still new to LaTeX, but I cant resist on giving a proposal for a LaTeX
> > improvement.
> >
> > I think that any of the 20 most common graphics formats shall be
> > include:able using \includegraphics.
> >
> > Bitmap as well as vector.
> > Using latex as well as using pdflatex.
>
> the problem is, that to first order, this is nothing to do with latex
> itself.

At least it has to do with the interface to LaTeX's graphicx
package.

> latex needs to know the dimensions of the graphic, only.

There are a lot of "graphics" formats (eg. PDF, PS, ...)
that contain several "pages", so the graphicx package needs
to know the number of pages, too.

> the rest is
> down to the dvi->whatever converter (in the case of latex) or to
> pdftex itself (in the case of pdflatex).

* dvi->whatever, pdfTeX, VTeX, ... use its own methods.
  pdfTeX, VTeX can provide bounding box informations back
  to TeX, but this is not possible with dvi->whatever.
  Perhaps a program by \immediate\write18 can help to
  provide the information in this case.
* Some TeX implementations provide \immediate\write18,
  so a conversion program could be called by the
  graphicx package to get informations and the
  understandable format of the graphics for the given driver.
* Plugin/Library method:
  * Interface for inclusion in TeX, pdfTeX, ... for
    extracting informations to LaTeX's graphicx package.
  * Interface for inclusion in dvi->whatever, pdfTeX, ...
    for reading the different graphics formats that are
    then put into the output.

Yours sincerely
  Heiko <[log in to unmask]>