[OS X TeX] graphicx, pdflatex and pdf file names

[Chris Goedde]

On Aug 3, 2007, at 9:58 AM, Bruno Voisin wrote:
>
> That said: you may find, for example, files with names like  
> myimage.ps.gz (compressed PS files), where the extension is  
> actually .ps.gz, and when used with the graphics package these are  
> supposed to be uncompressed on the fly by zcat before being fed to  
> the DVI driver.

Thanks for pointing this out, Bruno, which allows me to clarify: my  
example (and argument) was meant to be specific to the case  
foo.bar.pdf, not to the general world of nested extensions. I'm not  
aware of any nesting at present that ends in .pdf, such as  
foo.txt.pdf (possibly to indicate a pdf file that was pure text).

With that said, nested extensions such as .ps.gz and .tar.gz aren't  
the only way to go. I've seen .tgz used instead of .tar.gz; something  
similar could be done in other cases. (Of course, if extensions are  
limited to three characters, that could be a problem.) And .ps.gz  
and .tar.gz are probably clearer to the user than .tgz. I'm not  
dogmatic, just practical :-).

I guess that also means that "fixing" pdflatex/graphicx is more  
complicated than I originally thought, since there are special cases  
to consider. Doing a naive right-to-left parsing of the filename for  
the extension would break the case you bring up. Oh well, that's the  
way it often is, unfortunately. So I take back some of my mean words  
about pdflatex/graphicx. I still wish they were smarter, though :-).

-- 
Chris


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