[pdftex] Man page for pdftosrc

[Frank Küster]

Hartmut Henkel <hartmut_henkel at gmx.de> wrote:

> On Wed, 2 Nov 2005, Frank Küster wrote:
>
>> Thomas, will you remove pdftosrc from teTeX; pdftex people, will you
>> remove it from the pdftex distribution?
>
> Why? What's wrong with it? 

The explanation what is "wrong" with it was in my original mail:

,----
| > On Wed, Aug 03, 2005 at 10:02:31PM +0200, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
| > > >>>>> "Heiko" == Heiko Oberdiek <oberdiek at uni-freiburg.de> writes:
| > > > On Tue, Aug 02, 2005 at 09:40:44AM +0200, Frank Küster wrote:
| > > >> the pdftosrc program included in pdftex has no documentation so
| > > >> far.  A year ago, Hilmar Preusse has started to write one and
| > > >> asked on this list about comments on his draft, but unfortunately
| > > >> nobody stepped up to have a look at it.
| > > 
| > > > Since AR 7/Linux and AR 6/Other, attachted files (see attachfile
| > > > package) can be extracted by normal user without the need of
| > > > special programs.  Therefore I would consider pdftosrc obsolete
| > > > for the purpose of attaching and extracing files.
| > > 
| > > there are many reasons not to regard pdftosrc as obsolete.
| > > 
| > > Adobe does not support all platforms, so there are many people who have
| > > to use xpdf instead.
| > 
| > The attachted files can also be extracted by other tools such
| > as pdftk (operation unpack_files).
| > 
`----

> I personally like it, have been using it quite often to check stream
> contents. Pdftk can't do this in batch mode, given a single object
> number. IMHO no point to remove it.

I don't know where the original conversation with Reinhard and Heiko
took place, and whether they can read this.  It's probably you who
should find a consensus, we don't care.  All we care about is the
manpage, and

> If it's only the man page, this can be done. I mean a generic,
> traditional manpage (e. g. pdftosrc has nothing to do with TeX). 

In fact it has been done, and all Hilmar and I requested that someone
from the pdftex team (or anybody else familiar to the program including
internals) can review the proposed manpage and approve it, or suggest
changes. 

The answer to this was that nobody would do it because it is obsolete.
If you think otherwise, the best thing to do would be to review the
manpage at

http://tug.org/mailman/htdig/pdftex/2004-July/005228.html

resubmitted as

http://tug.org/mailman/htdig/pdftex/2005-August/005918.html

Thank you very much,
Fran
-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer