in response to will and randomdeterminism who replied on
their blogs to my post. (btw, randomdeterminism, who are
you, if you don't mind telling me? just curious.)
1. it's not the state of affairs of tables in latex is so
bad. please try to avoid such flame bait :). it's a matter
of what i know in my head -- i know \halign and i don't have
anything but the simplest table constructs in latex and
context in my head. i didn't doubt that both latex and
context can do the job; anything can do the job. as always,
my goal was to get it done as quickly as possible so i can
go on to some other overdue project :).
2. as for pdfpages, it (specifically, \includepdfmerge)
seemed like the natural choice; perhaps that is just my
ignorance.. the real case is not one image, it is 33
different images. 33 different
\useexternalfigure commands doesn't sound fun.
3. you finessed the question of scaling by explicitly
specifying arbitrary sizes. part of my problem was that my
sizes were not obvious, the scaling is not the same in all
cases, and i didn't want to compute a bunch of five-decimal
place numbers by hand.
4. the real figure will appear in the next tugboat, we can
debate it further then :).