Making Acrobat PDF documents from (La)TeX
There are three general routes to PDF output: Adobe’s original
‘distillation’ route (via PostScript output), conversion of a
DVI file, and the use of a direct PDF generator such as
PDFTeX) or
MicroPress’s VTeX (which comes both as a
commercial version for Windows PCs, and as a
‘free’ version) for OS/2 and Linux systems).
For simple documents (with no hyper-references), you can either
- process the document in the normal way, produce PostScript
output and distill it;
- (on a Windows or Macintosh machine with the appropriate Adobe
tools installed) pass the output through the
PDFwriter in place of a printer driver (this route is a dead
end: the PDFwriter cannot create hyperlinks);
- process the document in the normal way and generate PDF
direct from the DVI using
dvipdfm/dvipdfmx; or
- process the document direct to PDF with PDFTeX or
VTeX. PDFTeX has
the advantage of availability for a wide range of platforms, VTeX
(available commercially for Windows, or free of charge, but
unsupported, for Linux or OS/2) has wider graphics
capability, dealing with encapsulated PostScript and some in-line PostScript.
To translate all the LaTeX cross-referencing into Acrobat
links, you need a LaTeX package to suitably redefine
the internal commands. There are two of these for LaTeX, both
capable of conforming to the
HyperTeX specification:
Heiko Oberdiek’s hyperref, and Michael Mehlich’s
hyper. (In practice, almost everyone uses
hyperref; hyper hasn’t been updated since 2000.)
Hyperref can often determine how it should generate
hypertext from its environment, but there is a wide set of
configuration options you can give via \
usepackage
. The package
can operate using PDFTeX primitives, the hyperTeX
\
special
s, or DVI driver-specific \
special
commands.
Both dvips and Y&Y’s DVIPSONE can
translate the DVI with these \
special
commands into
PostScript acceptable to Distiller, and
dvipdfm and dvipdfmx have \
special
commands of
its own.
If you use Plain TeX, the Eplain macros can
help you create PDF documents with hyper-references.
It can operate using PDFTeX primitives, or \
special
commands
for the dvipdfm/dvipdfmx DVI drivers.
While there is no free implementation of all of Adobe
Distiller’s
functionality, any but the very oldest versions of Ghostscript
provide pretty reliable distillation (but beware of the problems with
dvips output for distillation).
For viewing (and printing) the resulting files, Adobe’s
Acrobat Reader is available for a fair range of
platforms; for those for which Adobe’s reader is unavailable, remotely
current versions of ghostscript combined with
gv or GSview can display and print PDF
files, as can xpdf.
In many circumstances, Ghostscript combined with a viewer
application is actually preferable to Acrobat Reader. For example, on
Windows Acrobat Reader locks the .pdf
file it’s displaying: this
makes the traditional (and highly effective) (La)TeX development
cycle of “Edit-> Process-> Preview” become
rather clumsy — GSview doesn’t make the same
mistake.
- Acrobat Reader
- browse
ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/acrobatreader
- dvipdfm
- dviware/dvipdfm (or browse the directory)
- dvipdfmx
- dviware/dvipdfmx (or browse the directory)
- ghostscript
- Browse support/ghostscript/
- GSview
- Browse support/ghostscript/ghostgum/
- gv
- Browse support/gv/
- hyper.sty
- macros/latex/contrib/hyper (or browse the directory)
- hyperref.sty
- macros/latex/contrib/hyperref (or browse the directory)
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=acrobat