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Old 14th December 2009
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Oko Oko is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by vermaden View Post

Also tetex from ports works for me very good, but I create all images at inkscape in SVG and then inport them into *.tex document, so I do not need latest changes from TeX Live propably.
You are oversimplifying things. Asymptote might be the largest peace of software to be added to TeXLive 2009 but it is definitely not the most significant.

There are two classical school of thoughts when it comes to figures in TeX. One school including Donald Knuth himself supports use of MetaPost language for creating the figures. MetaPost was created by one of his Ph.D. students based on MetaFont created by Don. Asymtote is the modern reincarnation
of MetaPost.

Another school of thought to which I belong believes in use of full
PostScript language via command special and clever hack by Timothy Van Zandt aka PSTricks.

As you can see I spend all of my adult life never having a need for MetaPost or Asymtote for that matter.

There is also a third relative new powerful system called PGF/TikZ with all the limitation of PDF format which is not really programmable language and it is ill suited for graphics comparing to PostScript. If you like Beamer class of LaTeX presentation you are PGF/TikZ .

What you described in your post is use of the package graphicx to
include the figures created by some vectorial drawing program like Inkscape, qcad, or my old time favorite Xfig.


That is not the point of TeXLive. The point of TeXLive is to painlessly install many changes in base fonts and programs as well as various new classes (in my case of LaTeX) documents. Using teTeX often require reinventing wheel and coding from the scratch thousands lines of cod which is already coded and created by somebody else.

I will give you simple example. Try using Powerdot class of LaTeX presentations and your teTeX.
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