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Question has been elaborated in the title.

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@xport: There are very few exceptions, but usually you really should ask the question in the actual post. – Hendrik Vogt Dec 28 '10 at 17:16
@Hendrik, could you rewrite your comment in an easier-to-understand sentence? – xport Dec 28 '10 at 17:22
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@xport: In several recent questions, you've only put something like "The question has been written above" in the body of your post. Also here, the question is only in the title. You should ask the question in the body of the post. (And if possible, the title should be a bit shorter.) – Hendrik Vogt Dec 28 '10 at 17:26
@Hendrik. OK. I understand now. But, do you have idea how to shorten my title above? I am learning English so I have very limited skill to shorten sentences while maintaining the important idea remains conserved. – xport Dec 28 '10 at 17:35
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@xport: My main point was that you should repeat the question in the body of your post, and usually you should elaborate a bit. Here, a bit (one sentence) is quite enough. Moreover, I think that your English is quite good. (A possible shorter title is "Do I need a strong background in plain TeX for understanding PSTricks internals?" Then you could mention PostScript in the body of your post. But as I said, that's not my main point here.) – Hendrik Vogt Dec 28 '10 at 17:41
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PSTricks itself uses only plain TeX and lets nearly all calculations done by PostScript which is passed into the ps file as raw PostScript code. Informations from PostScript can be send back to TeX when running the ps file one time with Ghostscript.

  • *.sty: that are only the wrapper files for LaTeX to put informations in the logfile
  • *.tex is the TeX compatible file which is read by \input from the sty-file, when using latex
  • *.pro is the PostScript prolog file which is pure PostScript code which is used by one of the dvi-pdf or dvi-ps converters.

It is also possible to write real LaTeX packages which uses the PostScript interface. That a lot of PSTricks packages are written in TeX has only a historical background. However when you want to understand the internals then you need as usual for all LaTeX packages some knowledge in TeX.

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@Hendrik You said 'write real LaTeX packages which...', you mean by the code provide with PSTricks or just in general? It is interesting how LaTeX is re-discovering itself as a transformation tool, i.e PostScript, JavaScript, XML etc... – Yiannis Lazarides Dec 28 '10 at 18:24
I meant packages for PSTricks like pst-am, which has no TeX-Version – Herbert Dec 28 '10 at 18:54
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I'm sure Herbert will answer this, but I honestly cannot see how it would be. PSTricks has a well-defined interface and that is what matters.

TeX itself doesn't know anything about PostScript. There's a single primitive \special that sticks its contents in the dvi file. Some programs that read dvis do something special with these, dvips for example.

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