[tex-live] texdoc in luatex

[Heiko Oberdiek]

On Sat, Jun 30, 2007 at 06:22:49PM +0200, Florent Rougon wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de> wrote:
> 
> > Frank,
> > if Debian needs all PDF files comressed, which tools does Debian
> > provide to deal with them?
> 
>   1) Debian doesn't provide 'brain', but it has been a standard component
>      required on the user side for a lot of years...
> 
>   2) see(1)
> 
>   3) zxpdf(1)

You forgot the majority of PDF viewers:
* acroread
* ghostscript
* kpdf
* envince or whatever

Reinhard has my full agreement. Externally compressed PDF files
will cause lots of trouble and annoyment for the users.

If disk space is such an important issue, PDF-1.5 with
compressed object streams shows the way. The PDF viewers
will have to support this sooner or later.

> > and there are links in PDF files to other PDF files.  The doc trees
> 
> Unless the PDF specification has forseen the use of compressed files,
> this is indeed a real problem. :-/

For example, the hyperref documentation contains such links to other
PDF files.

> > Compressed files will cause a lot of problems and people can't use
> > programs of their choice to browse documentation.
> 
> The main problem I see (as a Debian guy who can polish the simple tools
> such as see(1)) is links from PDF files to other PDF files.

And the main problem are users like me who don't want to unpack
the files first to read them.

> As a consequence, I suppose these links are mostly useful for files that
> are supposed to be installed in the same directory, such as, I presume,
> the various files comprising the hyperref documentation. But even in
> this case, unless the PDF specification allows us to point to a .pdf.gz
> *and* $pdf_viewer_in_use is able to cope with that *and* we either don't
> change upstream choices (to ship as .pdf or .pdf.gz or .pdf.bz2) or
> rebuild the docs for Debian (to ship .pdf.bz2 *and* update the
> corresponding internal links in the docs, which would be a PITA), we're
> screwed.

You are screwed.

> That makes a lot of "if's", so I'd tend to say that we're basically
> screwed unless we (TL or Debian) give up on either compressed PDF files
> or on links from PDF files to other PDF files.

I would rather give up externally compressed PDF files and
switch to PDF 1.5 with compressed object streams instead.

Yours sincerely
  Heiko <oberdiek at uni-freiburg.de>