[texhax] includegraphics and image scaling

[Peter Davis]

Yes, many engineers used to take that position regarding software usability
too.  If you use the software incorrectly, it's your own fault if it
crashes, destroys your data, corrupts your hard drive, or whatever.  Then we
started making software that handles exceptions.  The world is a nicer
place.

It's not a matter of wielding clout.  My point about Photoshop is not that
Adobe cares one iota about what LaTeX does.  I'm trying to emphasize that
there will be *very* many files which exhibit this bug.  You can choose to
fail processing these files, or you can give inconsistent results (vis,
pdfTeX vs. XeTeX), or you can try to provide the most useful behavior.
 Engineering is about trade-offs.
.

On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 6:23 PM, Mark Hale <historical.linguist at gmail.com>wrote:

> In my world if an application writes a file which simultaneously
> asserts that the single image in that file is at 96dpi and at 72dpi,
> the application is creating "incorrect" files. I think this means
> that I live in a world where logic trumps bad programming.
>
> Being a standard tool does not make you bug-free, it merely
> gives you the political clout to compel others to deal with your
> buggy software. I wouldn't personally be surprised if many of
> the people involved with projects such as Xe(la)tex don't feel
> particularly strongly motivated by attempts to wield
> that clout.
>
> Mark
>
> > In the printing and publishing world, at least in my experience,
> Photoshop
> > is *the* de facto standard image manipulation tool.  Any file that comes
> > from Photoshop is, by definition, "correct."
> > -pd
>
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