Ignoring pdftex primitives

[Hans Hagen]

George White wrote:

> 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.

PDF is just another output format. It does offer some more things than
DVI, especially hyperthings and included graphics/fonts. From the users
point of view, not so much has changed. For normal, avarage documents,
there is no difference between in te process of making the document,
when using dvi or pdf. Things like bookmarks can easily be supported by
dvi viewers, if wanted. Building low level pdf things directly into the
document is dangerous and just as unwise as building in specials. 
 
The real fundamental differences between pdf and dvi are the 'one pass'
(no postprocessing) and 'object reuse', but these are typical things to
be taken care of at the low level macro writing.  

> 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.

Currently pdf inclusion is limited in (1) not sharing common fonts, (2)
potential clashes in resourcenames. I think some day (1) will be solved
and (2) is mostly due to bugs in viewers, so that one will be solved
too. 

Hans 

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                                          Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
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