[tex-live] tl doc formats

[gnwiii at gmail.com]

On 9/8/06, David Kastrup <dak at gnu.org> wrote:

> TeXlive contains DVI viewers.  It does not contain PDF viewers.  So I
> really don't understand how you gather that the users will be able to
> view PDF without problems, but not DVI, if what they have is a TeXlive
> DVD.

Any reasonable system will almost certainly have a working PDF viewer.
 PDF viewers are useful to a much broader community than just TeX
users, so the TeX community doesn't need to be concerned with support.
  Fabrice (who has considerable frontline experience with TeX on
Win32) made the decision to drop dvi support in xemtex.   Many TeX
users have no need to work with .dvi files, and are not at all
hindered by lack of a DVI viewer.

At work, where Win32 is the "standard", every PC has Adobe Reader and
I rarely encounter problems (when XP was new, buggy video drivers did
cause rendering errors or even crashes viewing PDF's).  Users who are
new to TeX (many recent science PhD's never encountered TeX in school)
are accustomed to viewing documents with Adobe Reader.  Experienced
TeX on Windows  users expect a DVI viewer with the capabilities of
Y&Y's DVIwindo, are disappointed by the free tools, and end up using
PDF. Win32 DVI viewers have not been as reliable as Adobe Reader, and
have less "polished" interfaces (e.g., hyperlinking, bookmarks,
outline views, scripting).    Examples (ConTeXt, beamer, etc) that
might interest someone considering whether to invest the effort to
learn Tex do use these PDF capabilities.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia