[tex-live] pdfopen on Mac OS X

[George N. White III]

On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 10:35 AM, Mojca Miklavec
<mojca.miklavec.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I realized that I have pdfopen on my Mac that has been installed
> together with MacTeX.
>
> The behaviour is as follows:
>
>> man pdfopen
> No manual entry for pdfopen
>
>> pdfopen --help
> pdfopen: acroread startup failed
> [...]

Since I do  most of my work from a command line, I have a
simple wrapper script called acroread in /usr/local/bin that
runs open -a Adobe\ Reader.app "$@", but pdfopen adds an
unsupported argument '-openInNewWindow' when it trys to
run acroread.

> The only one that conditionally works, but is pretty much useless on mac:
>
>> pdfopen -viewer xpdf some.pdf
>> Error: No paper information available - using defaults
> Error: No display font for 'Courier'
> Error: No display font for 'Courier-Bold'
> Error: No display font for 'Courier-BoldOblique'
> Error: No display font for 'Courier-Oblique'
> Error: No display font for 'Helvetica'
> Error: No display font for 'Helvetica-Bold'
> Error: No display font for 'Helvetica-BoldOblique'
> Error: No display font for 'Helvetica-Oblique'
> Error: No display font for 'Symbol'
> Error: No display font for 'Times-Bold'
> Error: No display font for 'Times-BoldItalic'
> Error: No display font for 'Times-Italic'
> Error: No display font for 'Times-Roman'
> Error: No display font for 'ZapfDingbats'

I wouldn't say useless.

At my work Apple Mac OS X is replacing SGI IRIX64
workstations.  Some users still have PC's running X servers
and need xpdf.   It also comes in handy when you need to
make sure a .pdf doc is compatible with xpdf so you can
send it to linux users.

Your xpdfrc file needs a bit of editing to tell xpdf where
to look for the Adobe "base 13" fonts.   We use macports
xpdf with ghostscript fonts.  The entries are already in
/opt/local/etc/xpdfrc, but commented out.

> This makes the program hardly usable on Mac OS X. I'm not complaining
> about that, but it would make sense to accept at least -v, -h, --help,
> --version parameters and to have a simple man page.
>
> Mac probably doesn't need a special program anyway (it has its own
> "open" command and Preview/Skim as most common viewers usually don't
> lock files; I admit though that I never remember how to open a file in
> acrobat from command line; it requires writing 'open -a "Adobe Acrobat
> Professional" file.pdf').

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia