[texhax] newbie questions

[Robin Fairbairns]

> While we're on the subject of newbie qustions ...
> 
> > it's damnably difficult to find things in the uk faq.
> 
> I realise there was a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek there, but I also
> wonder how many people are aware that there exists a downloadable pdf
> version (indeed, it is part of the MiKTeX distro: e.g.,
> ...\texmf\doc\faq\english\newfaq.pdf) and also that the Adobe Reader does
> have a simple (but very useful) word search facility (CTRL-F) - I use it all
> the time.

drives me up the wall.  desperately slow in ar5, takes an age to
initialise in ar6.  mind you, my fastest machine is 700mhz...

> In fact, while we're at it, I've been meaning to ask Robin if he did
> something strange in producing the pdf version:

the only strange thing i do is thumbpdf (with some help from heiko
oberdiek).  aiui, this doesn't do anything particularly out of the
ordinary: the weird stuff is done before the final pdflatex run.

> after scrolling through one
> or two found items in a search I always get the following message (Adobe
> Reader 6.01):
> 
> "Because the document has been modified [sic] since it was last searched,
> the search results are no longer valid. Would you like to repat the search?"
> 
> It's obviously absurd and answerng "no" allows the scrolling through the
> results to continue.  Now although it's certain to be some bug in the Adobe
> Reader, it's also true that I have never come across this error with any
> other pdf document.

i tried compiling with the most recent pdftex beta i have compiled
(1.11c-beta-20040208) and couldn't repeat your experience with ar5 (unix
and widnoze) or ar6 (widnoze, on my slowest -- 400mhz -- machine).

> But Robin: please, don't waste too much time on it ;-)

more fun than writing the stuff, that's for sure.

unless something changes pretty soon, it's unlikely the next version
will be compiled using a 2004 pdftex, but it would be nice to hear how
you get on with the next version.

robin