[tex-live] pdfopen on Mac OS X

Mojca Miklavec mojca.miklavec.lists at gmail.com
Tue May 10 15:35:07 CEST 2011


Hello,

I realized that I have pdfopen on my Mac that has been installed
together with MacTeX.

The behaviour is as follows:

> man pdfopen
No manual entry for pdfopen

> pdfopen --help
pdfopen: acroread startup failed

> pdfopen -h
pdfopen: acroread startup failed

> pdfopen -v
pdfopen: acroread startup failed

> pdfopen
pdfopen: invalid number of arguments
Usage: pdfopen [-viewer <prog>] <file.pdf>
       If the PDF viewer <prog> is displaying <file.pdf>, reload that file.
       Otherwise call <prog> to display <file.pdf>.
       The default viewer program is ar9.
       Implemented viewers are 'ar9' 'ar9-tab' 'ar8' 'ar7' 'ar5' and 'xpdf'.
       This is version 0.80 of pdfopen

> pdfopen some.pdf
pdfopen: acroread startup failed

> pdfopen -viewer Skim.app some.pdf
pdfopen: Unknown PDF viewer 'Skim.app'

> pdfopen -viewer ar9 some.pdf
pdfopen: acroread startup failed

The only one that conditionally works, but is pretty much useless on mac:

> pdfopen -viewer xpdf some.pdf
> Error: No paper information available - using defaults
Error: No display font for 'Courier'
Error: No display font for 'Courier-Bold'
Error: No display font for 'Courier-BoldOblique'
Error: No display font for 'Courier-Oblique'
Error: No display font for 'Helvetica'
Error: No display font for 'Helvetica-Bold'
Error: No display font for 'Helvetica-BoldOblique'
Error: No display font for 'Helvetica-Oblique'
Error: No display font for 'Symbol'
Error: No display font for 'Times-Bold'
Error: No display font for 'Times-BoldItalic'
Error: No display font for 'Times-Italic'
Error: No display font for 'Times-Roman'
Error: No display font for 'ZapfDingbats'

This makes the program hardly usable on Mac OS X. I'm not complaining
about that, but it would make sense to accept at least -v, -h, --help,
--version parameters and to have a simple man page.

Mac probably doesn't need a special program anyway (it has its own
"open" command and Preview/Skim as most common viewers usually don't
lock files; I admit though that I never remember how to open a file in
acrobat from command line; it requires writing 'open -a "Adobe Acrobat
Professional" file.pdf').

Mojca



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