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]>