[OS X TeX] pdfLaTeX

[Maarten Sneep]

On 28 nov 2004, at 22:59, Mark Smith wrote:

> there's an ongoing thread over on MacOSX-talk relating to the 
> generation of PDF files in OS X specifically about the fact that a lot 
> of "advanced" PDF features can be tapped with e.g. pdflatex which are 
> not immeiately available in Quartz.
>
> Quoting Steve Harley:
>
>> that pdflatex bypasses PostScript (and dvi) completely...
>>
>> ...suggests that it either generates PDF internally, or hooks into the
>> graphics primitives in Quartz (earlier i miswrote Aqua) that in turn
>> render directly into PDF
>>
>> Patrick and i both suspect it's the former, but the reason the latter
>> would be interesting is that it would show there's a way to add 
>> various
>> "extras" like bookmarks to the Quartz-based PDF-generation available 
>> to
>> all Mac OS X apps.. if true, this means there's more potential for 
>> Mac OS
>> X to directly compete with Adobe products in complex PDF workflows
>
> So, I thought I'd ask here where the real TeXperts are to be found:
>
> What exactly happens in this regard with pdflatex in OS X ?

pdftex is platform independent, so it doesn't use Quartz at all. It 
does run on
all unix systems, linux, **bsd, Mac OS X and Windows. Even the Acorn 
has a distro
available for it, I think.

> What role, if any, is played by the Quartz-based PDF generation code ?

None. That said, there is a derivative that _does_ use Quartz: it is 
called XeTeX,
and only runs on Mac OS X. The main advantage there is the capability 
to use
Mac OS X installed fonts in (La)TeX, without too much fuss.

Tiger will provide easy access to some of the features you mentioned 
(to some extend you can already do this, but you'd need to read the PDF 
manual from Adobe yourself, all 1200 pages of it. Then you'd have to 
write hooks in Carbon to get the thing to work. I'd wait for Tiger).

Maarten

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