From: Weiqi Gao <weiqigao AT a DOT crl DOT com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: pdftex (was Re: Tex)
Date: Tue, 09 Sep 1997 01:06:06 -0500
Organization: Spectrum Healthcare Services
Lines: 51
Message-ID: <3414E74E.66428DD0@a.crl.com>
References: <3414A62E DOT 1333 AT sympatico DOT ca> <5v2mgn$2ri$1 AT vnetnews DOT value DOT net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: a116023.stl1.as.crl.com
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Precedence: bulk

M. Schulter wrote:

> As an enthusiastic user of DJGPP's Web2c TeX, I can direct you to one ftp
> site for this distribution:
> 
> ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/simtelnet/gnu/djgpp/v2apps/tex/
> 
> I've managed to get DJGPP TeX and dvips working with Emacs and a
> PostScript interpreter; it has nice support for inline PostScript, and
> also for the standard 35 PostScript fonts (although as explained in the
> info documentation, you'll need to get an extra file with the required
> font information, available at CTAN, as I recall). If you're interested
> doing things like this with TeX and PostScript, I'd be glad to help out as
> much as I can.

While we are on the topic of TeX and PostScript and Type 1 fonts, let me
just through in another interesting possiblility: PDF file generation.

1.  Aladdin GhostScript 5.03, which you use to view the PostScript files
produced by dvips if you don't have a PostScript printer, includes a
ps2pdf command that turns your *.ps file into a *.pdf file for Web
distribution.  This is a minimalist PDF generator, turning anything
other than the 14 fonts that's part of the Adobe Acrobat distribution
into bitmaps.

2.  A more ambitious project is the pdftex
(ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/tex/ctan/systems/pdftex), which does a direct
*.tex to *.pdf translation (foregoing the *.dvi middle step), supports
all PostScript fonts, and has primitives to define hyperlinks, colors in
the resulting PDF file.  kpathsea.pdf was provided as an example there.

3.  A PostScript version of the default fonts in TeX, the Computer
Modern (cm) fonts, is available from the AMS (http://www.ams.org).

The conclusion here is of course that if I can set all of these stuff
up, then I could publish my mathematically oriented material on the Web
just as easily as simple HTML files.

The challenge here is that so far I have been able to only make 1. and
3. happen.  The pdftex part (2.), I haven't been able to set up.  The
pdftex source is available under the GPL, and is in a format that is
meant to be merged with the standard kpathsea and web2c sources (with
replacement Makefile.in and configure.in, etc.)  However, I can't do a
clean make yet under DJGPP.

I would appreciate it very much if someone could take a look into the
source, and come up with a DJGPP build procedure (even if a manual one).

--
Weiqi Gao
weiqigao AT a DOT crl DOT com