Making Acrobat documents from (La)TeX

There are three general routes to Acrobat output: Adobe’s original ‘distillation’ route (via PostScript output), conversion of a DVI file, and the use of a direct PDF generator such as PDFTeX (see PDFTeX) or MicroPress’s VTeX which comes both as a commercial version (for Windows PCs) and as a ‘free’ version) (for Linux systems).

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 the appropriate Adobe tools installed) pass the output through the PDFwriter in place of a printer driver (this route is a dead end: the PDFwriter cannot create hyperlinks);
• process the document in the normal way and generate PDF direct from the DVI with dvipdfm; or
• process the document direct to PDF with PDFTeX or VTeX. PDFTeX has the advantage of availability for a wide range of platforms, VTeX (available commercially for Windows, or free of charge for Linux or OS/2) has wider graphics capability, dealing with encapsulated PostScript and some in-line PostScript.

To translate all the LaTeX cross-referencing into Acrobat links, you need a LaTeX package to suitably redefine the internal commands. There are two of these for LaTeX, both capable of conforming to the HyperTeX specification (see Making hypertext documents from TeX): Heiko Oberdiek’s hyperref, and Michael Mehlich’s hyper. uses a configuration file to determine how it will generate hypertext; it can operate using PDFTeX primitives, the hyperTeX \specials, or DVI driver-specific \special commands. Dvips translates the DVI with these \special commands into PostScript acceptable to Distiller, and dvipdfm has \special commands of its own.

(In practice, almost everyone uses hyperref; hyper hasn’t been updated since 2000.)

If you use Plain TeX, Eplain macro package can help you create Acrobat documents with hyper-references (see “what is Eplain”). It can operate using PDFTeX primitives, or \special commands for the dvipdfm DVI driver.

There is no free implementation of all of Adobe Distiller’s functionality, any but the very oldest versions of ghostscript provide pretty reliable distillation (but beware of the problems discussed in dvips output for distillation). In fact, Distiller itself is now remarkably cheap (for academics at least).

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 ghostview or GSview can display and print PDF files.

In many circumstances, ghostscript combined with a 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 incredibly clumsy — GSview doesn’t make the same mistake.

Acrobat Reader

browse ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/acrobatreader

dvipdfm

dviware/dvipdfm (gzipped tar, browse)

ghostscript

Browse nonfree/support/ghostscript/

ghostview

Browse support/ghostscript/gnu/ghostview/

GSview

Browse nonfree/support/ghostscript/ghostgum/

hyper.sty

macros/latex/contrib/hyper (gzipped tar, browse)

hyperref.sty

macros/latex/contrib/hyperref (gzipped tar, browse)

This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=acrobat