[tex-live] pdfopen on Mac OS X

[George N. White III]

On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 10:33 AM, Jim Diamond <jim.diamond at acadiau.ca> wrote:

> Karl, Philip, Mojca and anyone else who is still listening:
>
> Sorry to take so long to get back to you, there were some urgent parts
> of my day job to deal with.
>
>
> On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 22:18 (+0000), Karl Berry wrote:
>
>> Jim, the version of (x)pdfopen in TeX Live matches what is on CTAN (in
>> support/xpdfopen), as far as I can tell.  Where is the new version and
>> can you upload it to CTAN?
>
> The CTAN version
>        http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/xpdfopen/pdfopen.c
> is the newest version.
> It was uploaded in May 2010 (yep, last year).
>
>
> I'm guessing that some of the confusion in this thread revolves around
> the fact that the code I took over (and the code I produced) seems to
> be very "X Window System" specific, and thus maybe not of much/any use
> to Mac people (such as Mojca Miklavec) and windows people (such as
> Philip Taylor).
>
>
> Philip (as you probably saw) says his pdfopen version is 0.2, which is
> presumably quite old.  I "inherited" version 0.61 from Taco Hoekwater
> and went from there.
>
> The comment in the README when I came on the scene told me
>        This is a Linux (X11) implementation of Fabrice Popineau's
>        pdfclose/pdfopen commands to control the Acrobat Reader.
>
>
> Philip: I don't do windows.  I don't know where a windows port came
> from.  I don't know where it is.  I don't know how a windows port
> would work.  I don't want to know :-)  Of course, if someone wants to
> create a version for windows that works, we should get it into CTAN.

Some more archaeology: At some time MiKTeX included something called
"pdfopen".  Now it
appears to be called "arctrl":

arctrl --version
MiKTeX AR Controller 2.9.4098 (MiKTeX 2.9)

>From the MiKTeX 2.9 sources, arctrl.ccp has:

/* arctrl.cpp: control Acrobat Reader

   Copyright (C) 2006-2011 Christian Schenk
*/

/* This program (arctrl) is based on public domain work by Fabrice
   Popineau. Based on Adobe documentation. */

The options appear to support "open/close a document", "goto page N", and
"goto a named destination" within the document.   A bug was filed recently
when arctrl was failing with Adobe Reader 10 (now fixed).  I only use MiKTeX
to check documents to make sure things work the same as they do using
TL on linux+OS X, so only learned of arctrl when I looked for pdfopen
in the MiKTeX sources.


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