[pdftex] [Support Request] Cross-compilation of pdftex

[Paulo Ney de Souza]

  But that should not be much of an impediment. Kaveh Bazarghan and 
Jonathan Kew have managed to compile XeTeX for the iPhone

    http://river-valley.tv/tex-as-an-ebook-reader/

and the work for the iPad and Android should be of similar magnitude.

The biggest impediment would be dealing with file system - which is very 
different, in the iOS case, and not as much so on Android.

It is easy to compile C for Android target, and that should be the 
preferred path here

    http://www.pocketmagic.net/?p=682

I have used TeX in both WindowsCE and Sharp Zaurus which were way more 
difficult to deal with ... here at the pointers to those compilations:

    
http://web.archive.org/web/20091017212151/http://www.rainer-keuchel.de/wince/texce.html

     http://www.snowelm.com/~t/doc/tips/20031120.en.html

The lack of a Android distribution is the sole reason why I pack 3 
devices to go these days, I would be really nice to see it included in 
TeXLive one day ... :)

Paulo Ney


On 10/30/2011 4:09 PM, john Culleton wrote:
> On Sat, 29 Oct 2011 23:45:04 +0200
> Kevin Jonas Young<youngkevinjonas at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>> Hi support team of pdftex,
>>
>> I tried contacting the pdftex developers with my question, however I
>> received no answer.
>>
>> First of all, thank you infinitely for writing and maintaining such a
>> great piece of software, which pdftex is!
>> I hope I can provide my share of service to the TEX community with
>> what follows.
>>
>> My wish is to cross compile pdftex against the Android-ARM target
>> (using NDK), because I can't stand the fact that for
>> tablets there exists simply no good typesetting software. I had a look
>> at your build system, but for a layman
>> it's easy to get confused.
>>
>> Therefore I'd be thankful if some of you developers could provide me
>> with a rundown on your build system and its
>> complexity - for in order to compile pdftex with the Android SDK, I
>> need to replicate the steps of your build system
>> using the NDK build system (simplified makefiles).
>>
>> Or do you have better suggestions?
>>
>> Thanks a bunch!
>> Kevin
> TeX was not designed to work on, or produce output for, online devices
> like tablets.
>
> Operational pdftex creates dvi or pdf files only. Either format
> converts easily to Postscript. To get to operational pdftex for an OS
> not falling in the MSWIN, OS X Linux or BSD families a compiler may
> need to be written.
>
>
> The original programming for TeX was done in a special language
> invented by Donald Knuth. I don't know what it is written in now. I
> suspect C.
>
> Specialized online devices tend to use variants of the html language,
> such as moibus, kindle or ePub.
>
> Is it doable? of course. But the Great Wall of China was a doable
> project also. When your tablet will support pdf then pdftex (or Context
> etc.) will produce files for that device.
>
>


-- 
Paulo Ney de Souza
University of California, Berkeley