[tex-live] MacTeX -- xpdf

George N. White III gnwiii at gmail.com
Tue Apr 23 13:37:45 CEST 2013


Adding more parts to MacTeX should only be done when there aren't
satisfactory alternatives.  The MacTeX wiki already mentions Poppler as the
source of those
utilities <http://mactex-wiki.tug.org/wiki/index.php/Viewers#Poppler>.

On OS X, you can install those utilities using the macports poppler
package.  The macports xpdf package prefixes the names of the utilities
with "xpdf-".  I'm not sure what is available from other OS X open source
packaging systems (homebrew, fink).  I rely heavily on macports to support
scripts that are used on OS X and linux -- if you are going to be doing
much scripting then it may be worthwhile setting up one of the open source
packaging systems.



On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 7:56 PM, Reinhard Kotucha
<reinhard.kotucha at web.de>wrote:

> Hi,
> a friend of mine installed MacTeX (TL-2012) recently.  Everything
> works like a charm.  However, I wrote a script for him (on Linux)
> which depends on pdftops (part of xpdf).  It turned out that this
> program didn't exist on his system.
>
> Aren't the xpdf support programs part of MacTeX or is his installation
> incomplete?
>
> I don't think that xpdf itself is needed because TeXShop and TeXworks
> are excellent previewers, but the accompanying commandline tools
> like pdftops, pdffonts, pdfinfo, pdfimages... are extremely useful.
> Not to mention that they are extremely reliable.
>
> BTW, Akira provides the xpdf commandline tools for W32TeX and TeX Live
> on Windows already, hence I assume that there is a way to compile
> xpdf --without-xpdf  :)
>
> Unless my friend's installation is incomplete, Dick, what do you
> think?
>
> Regards,
>   Reinhard
>
> --
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone:
> +49-511-3373112
> Marschnerstr. 25
> D-30167 Hannover                              mailto:
> reinhard.kotucha at web.de
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is
> NO.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>



-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/attachments/20130423/7d3a513e/attachment.html>


More information about the tex-live mailing list