Including graphics

Creating figures and illustrations with TEX isn't easy. Although it is theoretically possible to place small dots anywhere on a page and build up an arbitrarily complex picture, time and memory limitations make such a scheme impractical. (LATEX provides a picture environment, but it is very inefficient and only suitable for small, simple diagrams.) TEX does however provide a \special command which can be used to pass arbitrary information to the DVI interpreter. 's printing and previewing code interprets a \special command using a simple syntax that allows inclusion of a given file. Note that using \special can seriously reduce the portability of your TEX documents because a given DVI-reading program can only understand \special commands that obey its own particular syntax. One useful technique to enhance portability is to hide the actual \special call inside a macro; then when you move your TEX file to another computer all you need to do is change the macro definition (assuming the DVI driver supports similar functionality in its handling of \special). For an example of this approach see Larry Siebenmann's boxedeps.doc and boxedeps.tex in the Plain sub-folder in TeX-inputs. Another alternative is epsf.tex; see epsftest.tex in the TeX-docs folder. Using either of these macro packages will make your input files much more portable. A \special command can appear almost anywhere in your input file. It behaves like an invisible box of zero height and width. TEX simply stores the given information in the DVI file at the current page position. When previewing a DVI file, draws a small marker indicating the location of a \special. The ``Page Info'' item will display this location in paper coordinates as well as the text of the \special command. Similar information is displayed if you choose to show statistics when printing a DVI file.

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