Graphics
Creating illustrations with standard TEX commands 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 that can be used
to pass arbitrary information to the DVI reader.
For example, and dvips can interpret a \special
command containing the name of a graphic file and then include that
file in the preview or printed output.
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 translator supports similar functionality
in its handling of \special).
LATEX users should never need to use explicit \special commands.
The graphics and graphicx packages make it easy to include
graphic files. Plain TEX users can also use macro packages;
see Larry Siebenmann's boxedeps.doc and boxedeps.tex in
the Plain subfolder in TeX-inputs.
Another alternative is epsf.tex; see epsftest.tex in the
TeX-docs folder. Using a macro package will make your input files
much more portable.
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