[tex-live] pdfopen on Mac OS X

[Jim Diamond]

On Sun, May 15, 2011 at 01:37 (+0900), Akira Kakuto wrote:

> Dear Mojca,

>> All I know is that Hans always requests pdfopen.exe to be present in
>> our distribution which proves its usefulness for Windows people.

> pdfopen and pdfclose were originary written for windows by Fabrice.
> Taco ported those to X window system.  Version number of Fabrice's
> is not changed, but the ones in the present TL repository supports
> Adobe reader10 and Adobe acrobat10.

Akira,

thanks for the history lesson.  (I didn't know that, but perhaps
others did.)



On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 16:10 (+0100), Robin Fairbairns wrote:

> Jim Diamond <jim.diamond at acadiau.ca> wrote:

>>[...]

>> All: what we really need to do is to convince Adobe to support a
>> command-line incantation of the form
>> 	acroread [-refresh-if-already-open] [-start-at-page N] <file.pdf>
>> on all supported platforms, and then this whole problem would go away,
>> at least for people who want to use acroread.

>> Does anyone have any friends in high places at Adobe?

> foaf in an adobe devt team was persuaded to add a new feature.  it took
> some horrifically long time (>2yrs iirc) but did eventually appear.
"All comes to he who waits"?

> while this is a proof of concept, i can't imagine that the free software
> world couldn't patch all the holes you know of in pdfopen, in way less
> time than that.

> so let's all sing a merry song and look for some programmers, eh?


I assume the windows "pdfopen" program is working as desired.  If not,
someone who has access to a windows system might want to step up to
the plate there.


Well, I am happy to support the X11 version, the only real issues I
know of are that it needs a man page and a -h/--help option.  I don't
know of any other "real" problems, at least on Linux.  (Arguably, the
fact that my version doesn't have the (IMHO redundant) "--file"
argument is a problem, but I guess I could look at that.)


Does anyone have any other issues with the X11 version?


As for the OS X people, I don't know.  I see the Adobe docs muttering
something about the ability of acroread to be "remotely controlled" in
a manner analogous to what is done in windows, and so maybe some OS X
programmer is needed there.


By the way Robin, what merry song did you have in mind?  :-)

Cheers.

				Jim