[pdftex] FYI: Feature Requests for Adobe Reader

[Ross Moore]

Hi Victor,

On 05/04/2008, at 4:37 AM, Victor Ivrii wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 11:56 AM, George N. White III  
> <gnwiii at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>  Emacs+DocView on Fedora 8 displays a file (formatted with pdf(la)tex
>>  1.40.3) that AR and xpdf both render as blank pages.
>
> Could you post an example?
>>
>>  I think you are talking about X(treme)PDF, not the sort of PDF most
>>  TeX documents would produce.
>
> Some TeX documents produce forms, bundles, etc. I suspect that when
> people would more think about online publishing rather than producing
> poor man copies of paper articles, the use of all these things would
> increase

My thoughts exactly.

Here is an example that I'd like people to test,
in different version of PDF reader software and
different OS versions.


Get this mathematical paper:  (no subscription required)

    http://www.austms.org.au/Publ/Bulletin/V72P1/pdf/721-5019-LoPo.pdf

Go to the page numbered 21  (actually page 9 of 18).
Easiest is to click on the Figure 5 or Figure 6 bookmark.

Scroll down a few lines, if necessary (according to your
window view) until you find the reference to Figure 7.
The '7' should be blue, indicating a hyperlink.

Move the mouse over the 7, ready to click.
You should get a red rectangle, outlining a button.
Click the button.  What happens for you?

There are three possible actions that may occur, depending upon
your software and Javascript settings.

  1. an image pops up;
   (Check its tool-tip and see if you can move the image around.)

  2. you active the hyperlink, and skip to where Figure 7 occurs;

  3. nothing at all!

Oh, and another possibility   :-)

   4. your reader, or OS freezes or crashes.


The intended action is 1. (which works in AR on the Mac).
If this doesn't happen then either Javascript support is
turned off (and you should get 2. occurring),
or Javascript is unsupported or severely limited within
your browser software.
This ought to qualify as a bug worth reporting;
or fixing it could be considered as a feature request.


>>
>>  PDF seems be suffering from the old tradeofff where features are
>>  added at the expense of reliability.  If people are adding  
>> features, I'd
>>  like to see some designed to help with debugging:


Hope this is useful.

Cheers,

	Ross


------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ross Moore                                       ross at maths.mq.edu.au
Mathematics Department                           office: E7A-419
Macquarie University                             tel: +61 (0)2 9850 8955
Sydney, Australia  2109                          fax: +61 (0)2 9850 8114
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