The biggest change is in the routines for handling color in TeX and
postscript. Whereas previous versions used a special ASTeX color
routine that was ``intelligent'' and created its own color
separations, those routines have been completely eliminated and
replaced with more standard postscript color commands. For the
non-expert, here are the main differences you will notice:
- You can now see the color on the screen when you preview or when you
print with a color printer.
- ASTeX can no longer create its own color separations (at least not
professional quality ones).
- If you want to include postscript graphics from another program then
you do not need to add any special commands in order to get the colors
right...just use the usual color commands in that other program. (But
if you want the pictures to have a lot of the nice features of ASTeX
graphics then you will still need to ``massage'' the postscript.)
- The commands \color and \colorize work as before:
This is in black. \colorize{This is in color.} This is in black.
This is in black. {\color This is in color.} This is in black.
but there are several new color commands: \pushcolor and \pushblack
switch to color or black. Then, when you want to switch BACK to the color you
were in before you gave the ``push'' command you use \restorecolor.
Note that these commands don't pay any attention to TeX groupings or
environments and I recommend that you always ``pop'' back with
\restorecolor when you are done with the ``push''. Finally, you
should also know about \pushcolor[#] and \pushblack[#] where # is a
number between 0 and 1. These switch not to 100% color or black but
to a shaded amount specified by the #. So, for instance, if you say:
a \pushcolor b \pushcolor[.4] c \restorecolor d \restorecolor e
then ``a'' is in black, ``b'' is in dark color, ``c'' is a paler
color, ``d'' is back to the dark color and ``e'' is back to black.
Get it?
For the TeXpert's out there, this is the true story about the new
color commands. ASTeX now uses the dvips color stack. (This is good
because it means that ASTeX's color commands will now be compatible
with those given by popular packages like graphicx.) On the
postscript level, I am using three commands TeXcoloras0, TeXcoloras1
and TeXcoloras2. Each takes an argument of a single number which is
the ``level'' and they refer to the black ink, color ink and both-inks
respectively. (Both-inks is used, for instance, for registration
marks and other things which you want to appear on both color
separations.) So, for instance, when you say \@pushcolor[.5] the
expression
.5 TeXcoloras1
is added to the postscript file at that point.
Now, the ACTUAL color that these refer to depends (of course) on
commands you set in your format file. You use: \colorink, \blackink
and \bothinks to specify what color these will appear. They take four
arguments of numbers between 0 and 1 which are the amounts of cyan,
magenta, yellow and black in the color you want to see. So, if you
say
\colorink(1,0,.1,0)
in your format file then everything in color will appear in a bluish
color. You can even do a cheap sort of color separation by setting
all of the levels to zero.
Unfortunately, although I think that this is a pretty good way to
handle the colors the package PS.m (which converts Mathematica output
to ASTeX aware postscript files) does NOT work with this new system
yet. This means that a patch is necessary to allow the OLD commands
to act like the new ones. This patch was written by Dave Richards and
is included automatically when you use the command \psmathdefs to load
the definitions for mathematica postscript.
