Making PDF documents from (La)TeX
There are three general routes to PDF output: Adobe’s original
‘distillation’ route (via PostScript output), direct conversion of a
DVI file, and the use of a direct TeX-like PDF
generator such as PDFTeX.
For simple documents (with no hyper-references), you can either
- process the document in the normal way, produce PostScript
output and distill it;
- (on a Windows or Macintosh machine with appropriate
tools installed) pass the output through a PDFwriter in place
of a printer driver. This route is only appropriate for simple
documents: PDF writers cannot create hyperlinks;
- process the document with “vanilla” LaTeX and generate PDF
direct from the DVI using dvipdfm/dvipdfmx; or
- process the document direct to PDF with PDFTeX,
LuaTeX, or XeTeX.
To translate all the LaTeX cross-referencing into Acrobat
links, you need a LaTeX package to redefine
the internal commands. There are two of these for LaTeX, both
capable of conforming to the
HyperTeX specification:
Heiko Oberdiek’s hyperref, and Michael Mehlich’s
hyper. (In practice, almost everyone uses
hyperref; hyper hasn’t been updated since 2000.)
Hyperref can often determine how it should generate
hypertext from its environment, but there is a wide set of
configuration options you can give via \
usepackage
. The package
can operate using PDFTeX primitives, the hyperTeX
\
special
s, or DVI driver-specific \
special
commands.
Both dvips and Y&Y’s DVIPSONE can
translate the DVI with these \
special
commands into
PostScript acceptable to Distiller, and
dvipdfm and dvipdfmx have \
special
commands of
their own.
If you use Plain TeX, the Eplain macros can
help you create PDF documents with hyper-references.
It can operate using PDFTeX primitives, or \
special
commands
for the dvipdfm/dvipdfmx DVI drivers.
While there is no free implementation of all of Adobe
Distiller’s
functionality, any but the implausibly old versions of
ghostscript
provide pretty reliable distillation (but beware of the problems with
dvips output for distillation).
For viewing (and printing) the resulting files, Adobe’s
Acrobat Reader is available for a fair range of
platforms; for those for which Adobe’s reader is unavailable, remotely
current versions of ghostscript
combined with gv or
gsview can display and
print PDF files, as can xpdf.
In some circumstances, a
ghostscript-based viewer
application is actually preferable to Acrobat Reader. For example, on
Windows Acrobat Reader locks the .pdf
file it’s displaying: this
makes the traditional (and highly effective) (La)TeX development
cycle of “Edit→ Process→ Preview” become
rather clumsy~— gsview
doesn’t make the same <mistake.
- Acrobat Reader
- download from http://get.adobe.com/reader
- dvipdfm
- dviware/dvipdfm (or browse the directory)
- dvipdfmx
- dviware/dvipdfmx (or browse the directory); catalogue entry
- gv
- Browse support/gv; catalogue entry
- hyper.sty
- macros/latex/contrib/hyper (or browse the directory)
- hyperref.sty
- macros/latex/contrib/hyperref (or browse the directory); catalogue entry
This answer last edited: 2014-01-22
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