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<head>
<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label acrobat</title>
</head><body>
<h3>Making Acrobat PDF documents from (La)TeX</h3>
<p/>There are three general routes to PDF output: Adobe&#8217;s original
&#8216;distillation&#8217; route (via PostScript output), conversion of a
DVI file, and the use of a direct PDF generator such as
<a href="FAQ-whatpdftex.html">PDFTeX</a>) or
MicroPress&#8217;s VTeX (which comes both as a 
<a href="FAQ-commercial.html">commercial version</a> for Windows PCs, and as a
<a href="FAQ-TeXsystems.html">&#8216;free&#8217; version)</a> for OS/2 and Linux systems).
<p/>For simple documents (with no hyper-references), you can either
<ul>
<li> process the document in the normal way, produce PostScript
  output and distill it;
<li> (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);
<li> process the document in the normal way and generate PDF
  direct from the DVI using
  <i>dvipdfm</i>/<i>dvipdfmx</i>; or 
<li> 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.
</ul>
<p/>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
<a href="FAQ-hyper.html">HyperTeX specification</a>:
Heiko Oberdiek&#8217;s <i>hyperref</i>, and Michael Mehlich&#8217;s
<i>hyper</i>.  (In practice, almost everyone uses
<i>hyperref</i>; <i>hyper</i> hasn&#8217;t been updated since 2000.)
<i>Hyperref</i> can often determine how it should generate
hypertext from its environment, but there is a wide set of
configuration options you can give via <code>\</code><code>usepackage</code>.  The package
can operate using PDFTeX primitives, the hyperTeX
<code>\</code><code>special</code>s, or DVI driver-specific <code>\</code><code>special</code> commands.
Both <i>dvips</i> and Y&#38;Y&#8217;s <i>DVIPSONE</i> can
translate the DVI with these <code>\</code><code>special</code> commands into
PostScript acceptable to Distiller, and
<i>dvipdfm</i> and <i>dvipdfmx</i> have <code>\</code><code>special</code> commands of
its own.
<p/>If you use Plain TeX, the <a href="FAQ-eplain.html">Eplain macros</a> can
help you create PDF documents with hyper-references.
It can operate using PDFTeX primitives, or <code>\</code><code>special</code> commands
for the <i>dvipdfm</i>/<i>dvipdfmx</i> DVI drivers.
<p/>While there is no free implementation of all of <i>Adobe</i>
<i>Distiller</i>&#8217;s
functionality, any but the very oldest versions of <i>Ghostscript</i>
provide pretty reliable distillation (but beware of the problems with
<a href="FAQ-dvips-pdf.html"><i>dvips</i> output for distillation</a>).
<p/>For viewing (and printing) the resulting files, Adobe&#8217;s
<i>Acrobat</i> <i>Reader</i> is available for a fair range of
platforms; for those for which Adobe&#8217;s reader is unavailable, remotely
current versions of <i>ghostscript</i> combined with
<i>gv</i> or <i>GSview</i> can display and print PDF
files, as can <i>xpdf</i>.
<p/>In many circumstances, <i>Ghostscript</i> combined with a viewer
application is actually preferable to Acrobat Reader.  For example, on
Windows Acrobat Reader locks the <code>.pdf</code> file it&#8217;s displaying: this
makes the traditional (and highly effective) (La)TeX development
cycle of &#8220;Edit-&#62; Process-&#62; Preview&#8221; become
rather clumsy &#8212; <i>GSview</i> doesn&#8217;t make the same
mistake.
<dl>
<dt><tt><i>Acrobat Reader</i></tt><dd>browse
  <a href="ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/acrobatreader">ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/acrobatreader</a>
<dt><tt><i>dvipdfm</i></tt><dd><a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/dviware/dvipdfm.zip">dviware/dvipdfm</a> (or <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/dviware/dvipdfm/">browse the directory</a>)
<dt><tt><i>dvipdfmx</i></tt><dd><a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/dviware/dvipdfmx.zip">dviware/dvipdfmx</a> (or <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/dviware/dvipdfmx/">browse the directory</a>); <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/help/Catalogue/entries/dvipdfmx.html">catalogue entry</a>
<dt><tt><i>ghostscript</i></tt><dd>Browse <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/support/ghostscript/GPL">support/ghostscript/GPL</a>; <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org//help/Catalogue/entries/ghostscript-GPL.html">catalogue entry</a>
<dt><tt><i>GSview</i></tt><dd>Browse <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/support/ghostscript/ghostgum">support/ghostscript/ghostgum</a>; <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org//help/Catalogue/entries/gsview.html">catalogue entry</a>
<dt><tt><i>gv</i></tt><dd>Browse <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/support/gv">support/gv</a>; <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org//help/Catalogue/entries/gv.html">catalogue entry</a>
<dt><tt><i>hyper.sty</i></tt><dd><a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/hyper.zip">macros/latex/contrib/hyper</a> (or <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/hyper/">browse the directory</a>)
<dt><tt><i>hyperref.sty</i></tt><dd><a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/hyperref.zip">macros/latex/contrib/hyperref</a> (or <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/hyperref/">browse the directory</a>); <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/help/Catalogue/entries/hyperref.html">catalogue entry</a>
</dl>
<p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=acrobat">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=acrobat</a>
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