summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/Master/texmf-dist/doc/generic/FAQ-en/html/FAQ-acrobat.html
blob: 047c6933ec34e4181c7ca733f3efbfbbaf7ad61f (plain)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
<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&rsquo;s original
&lsquo;distillation&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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">&lsquo;free&rsquo; 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&rsquo;s <i>hyperref</i>, and Michael Mehlich&rsquo;s
<i>hyper</i>.  (In practice, almost everyone uses
<i>hyperref</i>; <i>hyper</i> hasn&rsquo;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&amp;Y&rsquo;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>&rsquo;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&rsquo;s
<i>Acrobat</i> <i>Reader</i> is available for a fair range of
platforms; for those for which Adobe&rsquo;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&rsquo;s displaying: this
makes the traditional (and highly effective) (La)TeX development
cycle of &ldquo;Edit-&gt; Process-&gt; Preview&rdquo; become
rather clumsy &mdash; <i>GSview</i> doesn&rsquo;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://www.tex.ac.uk/www.tex.ac.uk  tex-archive/dviware/dvipdfm.zip">dviware/dvipdfm</a> (or <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/www.tex.ac.uk  tex-archive/dviware/dvipdfm/">browse the directory</a>)
<dt><tt><i>dvipdfmx</i></tt><dd><a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/www.tex.ac.uk  tex-archive/dviware/dvipdfmx.zip">dviware/dvipdfmx</a> (or <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/www.tex.ac.uk  tex-archive/dviware/dvipdfmx/">browse the directory</a>)
<dt><tt><i>ghostscript</i></tt><dd>Browse <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/www.tex.ac.uk  tex-archivesupport/ghostscript/">support/ghostscript/</a>
<dt><tt><i>GSview</i></tt><dd>Browse <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/www.tex.ac.uk  tex-archivesupport/ghostscript/ghostgum/">support/ghostscript/ghostgum/</a>
<dt><tt><i>gv</i></tt><dd>Browse <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/www.tex.ac.uk  tex-archivesupport/gv/">support/gv/</a>
<dt><tt><i>hyper.sty</i></tt><dd><a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/www.tex.ac.uk  tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/hyper.zip">macros/latex/contrib/hyper</a> (or <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/www.tex.ac.uk  tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/hyper/">browse the directory</a>)
<dt><tt><i>hyperref.sty</i></tt><dd><a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/www.tex.ac.uk  tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/hyperref.zip">macros/latex/contrib/hyperref</a> (or <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/www.tex.ac.uk  tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/hyperref/">browse the directory</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>
</body>