[tex-live] acrotex files

cfrees at imapmail.org cfrees at imapmail.org
Mon Oct 5 00:17:22 CEST 2009


Just to note that there is a distinction between "depends on Adobe
Acrobat" and "depends on Adobe Reader". As I understand it, most of the
eDucation bundle does not depend on Acrobat; most of AeB Pro does
depend on Acrobat. I don't know if there are features of the PDFs
produced using eforms etc. which require Reader rather than another PDF
viewer but, if so, I'm assuming that's a matter of what's enabled in
other PDF viewers relative to what's possible in terms of the PDF
format.

Also note that there are currently some packages in TeX Live which
require the eDu. bundle (or require it for some features, at least). If
AcroTeX is excluded because using the created PDFs require Reader for
all features, surely these packages should also be excluded?

I regard it as unfortunate that I'm dependent on Acrobat, Reader and a
non-free OS and so I should make clear that I'm not necessarily
advocating inclusion of AcroTeX in TL. Even aside from dependency
considerations, if the thing is a pain to install, I'm certainly not
sure it is worth that.

But I notice some people talking about AcroTeX depending on Acrobat
(for document production) and others about it depending on Reader (for
document viewing) and those are different. AcroTeX seems to include a
whole bunch of things, with at least two bundles on CTAN and the
tie-ups with Acrobat/Reader are different.

I'll say, too, I investigated this when writing about it for the TeX on
Mac wiki, checked I could install it etc. but I haven't actually _used_
it so my understanding could be quite wrong.

- cfr


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