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Jin-Hwan Cho
Korea Institute for Advanced Study
chofchof@ktug.or.kr
Thursday July 24, 2003
In this presentation I would like to introduce a DVI to PDF translator, DVIPDFMx (formerly DVIPDFM-cjk), which is an extension of DVIPDFM developed by Mark. A. Wicks.
People might ask why we consider a DVI to PDF translator at this moment, because we already have a powerful TEX software, pdfTEX, which generates a PDF result directly from TEX sources without using the DVI format. It is true for people using languages which make use of the Latin alphabet (or other 8-bit character set) that pdfTEX is sufficient.
However, the situation is quite different if we use Northeast Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese and Korean; simply CJK) or Unicode using 16-bit characters. Actually the current version of pdfTEX has no ability to handle 16-bit characters. Even though a PDF viewer shows 16-bit characters in a PDF file generated by pdfTEX, the codes are not 16-bit but 8-bit. It means that extracting and searching those 16-bit characters are impossible. Furthermore, it is quite hard to generate a PDF file with pdfTEX having bookmarks or text annotations with 16-bit characters.
That is the main reason why I am going to introduce DVIPDFMx at this moment. The DVI driver software, DVIPDFMx, handles 16-bit character using CID-keyed font technology which is already included in the PDF specification. Therefore, DVIPDFMx works well with almost all TEX variants including ASCII pTEX, the most popular TEX software in Japan, and Omega. In particular, it might be interesting to show the audience a PDF example containing 16-bit characters from dozens of different languages, which are extractable and searchable as a matter of course.
Recently there was a revolutionary progress in developing DVIPDFMx, that was when DVIPDFMx began to support ConTEXt. Many source codes of DVIPDFMx were rewritten in this stage. At present DVIPDFMx handles many ConTEXt documents containing complex MetaPost figures (color shading too) and interactive forms (JavaScript too). I would like to show those fantastic examples in the presentation.
There are also many features in DVIPDFMx not mentioned above, PDF encryption for example. More information on DVIPDFMx can be found in the project homepage from the following URL.
http://project.ktug.or.kr/dvipdfmx/The DVIPDFMx project is a combined work of the DVIPDFM-jpn project by Shunsaku Hirata and its modified version, DVIPDFM-kor, by Jin-Hwan Cho.
