[tex-live] texdoc in luatex

Florent Rougon f.rougon at free.fr
Mon Jul 2 12:51:18 CEST 2007


Hi,

Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de> wrote:

> I suppose that zxpdf can deal with compressed PDF files which are
> linked to other PDF files, but I fear that we cannot assume that it is
> available on all platforms supported by TeXLive.  Furthermore, xpdf
> does not support everything needed.  It is unavoidable that acroread
> can be used.

[...]

> I don't see any good reason why the PDF specification should support
> it because objects in PDF files are compressed already.  It actually
> doesn't make sense to compress PDF files.  Maybe PDF files produced by
> pdftex are larger than necessary because pdftex does not convert Type1
> fonts to CFF, but future versions will do that.  PDF files can be
> smaller when object stream compression is enabled in pdftex, but
> object stream compression requires Acrobat version < 5, but we cannot
> assume that everyone has a recent version of acroread.

A lot of objections have been raised about compressed PDF files. I
believe the trouble is not worth the gain (particularly considering that
a) there seems to be unsolvable problems with PDF-to-PDF links b)
PDF-1.5 will make things better in this respect and c) improvements to
pdfTeX and other tools can also help here). As a consequence, I've given
up on this point (which I wasn't trying to push in any way, just
offering for consideration :).

I believe this is the consensus on this list.

> If you have Debian in mind, use Python.  But a Python script is
> useless for TeXLive.  It will not work on all platforms.

Well, I won't force anyone to use it; I'm not that kind of guy. :)

Anyone who would want to use this program would have to install Python,
but that's it.

Besides, having a new program available doesn't necessarily mean
texdoctk has to be removed from TL.

-- 
Florent


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