[pdftex] pdfTeX in the big business now

[Hans Hagen]

At 12:27 PM 3/26/01 +0200, Martin Schröder wrote:
>On 2001-03-26 02:04:03 -0800, Colin Marquardt wrote:
>> Martin Schröder <ms at artcom-gmbh.de> writes:
>> > On 2001-03-24 14:46:50 -0800, Colin Marquardt wrote:
>> > > Do people know of other exposures of pdfTeX to the broad public like
>> > > that?  I know some of Hans Hagen's projects, but these seem more
>> > > specialized than print2web.
>> > 
>> > The next IKEA-catalogue will probably be printed using pdfTeX.
>> > Enough public? :-)
>> 
>> Ah, cool. Is ArtCom doing it? Hmm, you probably can't tell people
>> about it...
>
>In a way -- pdfTeX will be the heart of our new imposition
>software, which will most likely be used for e.g. the next IKEA

ah, but if they would typeset the catalogue with tex, they could do the
imposition directly, which woul dsave them quite some font resources and
filesize.  

>catalogue. Hmm -- anybody got a larger print run with TeX? :-)

Are you looking for bytes or complexity? Pasting pages is mainly file
copying, also for pdftex -) 

For some yeare already pdftex feels quite happy when processing multimeg
docs with thousands of pages and 5-6 digit numbers of hyperthings and
objects and graphics and ... 

Currently our challenge is not in processing such docs but in keeping up
speed with dtp applications ["we are doing this in quark now (i.e. multiple
layouts per doc, many layers of info, fancy backgrounds after running
texts, floats everywhere), but wanna do it in xml, so can you do it with
tex (so that the formulas are handled ok", so far we manage -)] So, our
next steps are not in making bigger docs, but making a couple of quark (and
alike) killing batched dtp modules -) 

Concerning the time tables: as far as i know that kind of apps are done by
tex all over the world ever since tex was available. Of course companies
seldom say this aloud because they don't want the competition to know.
Unfortunately we never run into such projects, which is a pity because it's
rather plain texing and therefore not that hard to implement. The main
advantage of pdftex for that kind of apps is that one can omit the dvi-ps
step.   

Hans    
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                                  Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE | pragma at wxs.nl
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