[tex-live] texdoc in luatex

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Sat Jun 30 21:32:48 CEST 2007


Hi Florent and thanks for the detailed response.

Florent Rougon writes:

 > 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)

I suppose that zxpdf can deal with compressed PDF files which are
linked to other PDF files, but I fear that we cannot assume that it is
available on all platforms supported by TeXLive.  Furthermore, xpdf
does not support everything needed.  It is unavoidable that acroread
can be used.

I doubt that see(1) is able to deal with compressed files required by
other PDF files.  But you can try with hyperref.
 
 > > And why do you take care about Windows?
 > 
 > I'm not Frank, but I suppose the reason is that he's a nice guy and
 > takes pity on those poor lost souls (well, to be accurate, sometimes
 > they are not lost but simply forced by someone higher in the hierarchy
 > :).

What I meant is that there is no Debian for Windows (yet) and
regarding TeXLive, I don't see how to support compressed PDF files for
all the platforms supported by TeXLive.

 > > In TeXLive we cannot have compressed PDF files because this would
 > > break a lot of things.  There are HTML files with links to PDF files
 > 
 > I think a good combination of web server/web browser should deal with
 > with gz/bzip2/etc. being an encoding in the HTTP protocol. However, I'm
 > not sure what to do when browsing local files, i.e. when no HTTP server
 > can provide the proper encoding metadata. But I'm not an expert in this
 > area, so I may be missing some way out of the problem.

There is no HTTP server involved and it is required that people can
use the software they have already installed.  You can do almost
everything in Debian if you provide the required software.  TeXLive
supports more platforms than Debian.  And this is the problem.  You
can use zxpdf in Debian but porting it to Windows is certainly quite
painful.  

 > > 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. :-/

I don't see any good reason why the PDF specification should support
it because objects in PDF files are compressed already.  It actually
doesn't make sense to compress PDF files.  Maybe PDF files produced by
pdftex are larger than necessary because pdftex does not convert Type1
fonts to CFF, but future versions will do that.  PDF files can be
smaller when object stream compression is enabled in pdftex, but
object stream compression requires Acrobat version < 5, but we cannot
assume that everyone has a recent version of acroread.

 > > should be browsable because not everyone is familiar with commandline
 > > tools and texdoctk is incomplete and does not support documentation
 > > written in any other language than English.
 > 
 > FWIW, I'm pondering these days about rewriting texdoctk in Python (and
 > probably Qt for the GUI toolkit) to deal with the major problems we've
 > seen in the last years, mainly that:

It's certainly not a big problem to include a Python script but it's
quite unlikely that Python itself will be included.  We have Perl/Tk
for Windows on the CD/DVD but there is no space for Python on the CD.

If you have Debian in mind, use Python.  But a Python script is
useless for TeXLive.  It will not work on all platforms.

 > If people are interested, this may motivate me to allocate the needed
 > time in these holidays.

Before you plan anything it would be nice to hear about Karl's
opinion.  I'm not against everything but I see a lot of problems.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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