Ignoring pdftex primitives

[George White]

On Mon, 14 Dec 1998, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:

> [...]
> The stuff about whether file names can start with the word "depth" is
> mildly interesting, I suppose, and pdfTeX's syntax should probably be
> changed for that reason. But I for one am simply shocked that serious
> TeX users would insert \pdfXXX commands directly in their source
> files at all, as opposed to wrapping them in TeX-version-sensitive macros.
> 
> Sebastian
 
It seems to be a fundamental principle that serious people will be
shocked and amazed by the way their tools are used in the real world.

It would probably help, particularly in these days of cut and paste
document writing, to encourage better practices if Sebastian's suggestion
were adopted in the example documents provided with pdftex and in the FAQ. 
It would also be useful to add pdftex support to some widely used
documents such as the manual for the graphics package, and in fact useful
if all the latex2e documentation could be made more pdftex friendly to
take advantage of things like the outline view in acrobat reader.  I find
that online documentation in pdf format is more likely to be read than if
it is in .dvi or even .ps format, if only because it takes a bit more
effort on the part of users to support .dvi and .ps files in their WWW
browsers than to support pdf files. 

I once tried making graphics.pdf as an exercise -- at the time there were
some issues with the current version of pdftex for including pdf figures,
but the biggest technical challenge might be creating the pdf test image,
a.pdf, in a platform independent way.  


--
George White <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca> Halifax, Nova Scotia