Thecomputer programpdfTeXis an extension ofKnuth's typesetting programTeX,and was originally written and developed into a publicly usable product by Hàn Thế Thành as a part of the work for his PhD thesis at the Faculty of Informatics,Masaryk University,Brno,Czech Republic.The idea of making this extension to TeX was conceived during the early 1990s, whenJiří ZlatuškaandPhil Taylordiscussed some developmental ideas withDonald KnuthatStanford University.Knuth later met Hàn Thế Thành in Brno during his visit to the Faculty of Informatics to receive an honorary doctorate from Masaryk University.
| Original author(s) | Hàn Thế Thành |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | The pdfTeX team |
| Stable release | 1.40.25[1] 
/ 9 March 2023 |
| Repository | |
| Operating system | Multiplatform |
| Type | Typesetting |
| License | GNU General Public License |
| Website | www |
Two prominent characteristics of pdfTeX are character protrusion, which generalizes the concept ofhanging punctuation,and font expansion, an implementation ofHermann Zapf's ideas for improving the grayness of a typeset page. Both extend the core paragraph breaking routine. They are discussed in Thành's PhD thesis.[2]
pdfTeX is included in most modern distributions ofLaTeXandConTeXt(includingTeX Live,MacTeX,andMiKTeX)[3]and used as the default TeX engine.[4][5]The main difference between TeX and pdfTeX is that whereas TeX outputsDVIfiles, pdfTeX can outputPDFfiles directly. This allows tight integration of PDF features such ashypertextlinks and tables of contents, using packages such ashyperref.On the other hand, packages (such asPSTricks) which exploit the earlier conversion process of DVI-to-PostScriptmay fail, although replacements such asPGF/TikZhave been written. Direct embedding of PostScript graphics is no longer functional, and one has to use a program such as eps2pdf to convert EPS files to PDF, which can then be directly inserted by pdfTeX.
It is possible to obtain DVI output from pdfTeX. This DVI output should be identical to that of TeX, unless pdfTeX's extramicrotypographyfeatures have been activated. Moreover, since LaTeX, ConTeXtet al.are simplymacropackages for TeX, they work equally well with pdfTeX. Hence,pdflatex,for example, calls the pdfTeX program using the standard LaTeX macros to typeset LaTeX documents, whereas it was the default rendering engine for ConTeXt documents. Current versions of ConTeXt use
LuaMetaTeX as default rendering engine.[6]
Features
editpdfTeX has several features not available in standard TeX:
- NativeTrueTypeandType 1 fontembedding
- Micro-typographic extensions such as marginkerningand font expansion
- Direct access to PDF-specific features such as hyperlinks, tables of contents and document information
See also
edit
References
edit- ^"NEWS".
- ^PhD thesis
- ^"TeX catalogue online".Archived fromthe originalon 2010-12-25.Retrieved2007-09-12.
- ^"Documentation - TeX Live - TeX Users Group".tug.org.Retrieved2020-11-14.
- ^Christian Schenk: MiKTeX 2.5: pdfetex becomes default engineArchived2007-09-07 at theWayback Machine
- ^"LuaMetaTeX - README".GitHub.Retrieved2024-08-18.
External links
edit- pdfTeX project page
- pdfTeX manual
- Micro-typographic extensions to the TeX typesetting system- dissertation by Hàn Thế Thành
- 2008 interview