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Date:         Mon, 14 Dec 1998 22:18:24 +0100
From: Hans Aberg <haberg@MATEMATIK.SU.SE>
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Subject:      Re: portable LaTeX
Status: R

At 19:05 +0000 1998/12/14, Timothy Murphy wrote:
>> >It's madness, in my view, to modify the TeX engine
>> >in order to allow inclusion of particular graphic formats.
>>
>> What modifications do they do in pdfTeX?
>
>I don't understand the question.
>Since TeX does not understand graphics in any format while pdfTeX does,
>there is obviously a modification, as indeed is clear from pdftex.ch

Depending wether the way of TeX parsing is changed, or if it merely
compiles to PDF instead of DVI.

>However, my main point was that since pdftex is a single monolithic program,
>every additional graphics format -- PDF, PS, TIFF, etc --
>must involve further modification to pdfTeX itself.

This is however a core question: So does PDF not itself allow inclusion of
other formats like say GIF, JPEG?

>> But will an extended DVI suffice as a new byte-code for WWW publishing?
>
>I take more or less the opposite view to that generally expressed here.
>In my view, it is up to browsers to accept
>generally accepted formats like PDF or DVI --
>it's not up to the outside world
>to try to convert information into the format expected by the browser.

If you want it that way, you still need a WWW byte-code that allows the
inclusion of such formats. So you are back to the same problem.

>I would expect browsers to define something like a Java interface,
>with the understanding that they will display anything
>which implements this interface.

That is already outdated as a computer language technique: One uses
something called an IDL (Interface Definition Language), which defines an
abtsract language for such purposes. (See for example the ASDL
<http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~danwang/Papers/dsl97-abstract.html>.)
However, that is on the (higher) computer language level.

The byte-code level is the JVM (Java Virtual Machine), which seems to
correspond to the (extended) DVI, PDF and such formats.

So I think you need two wholly independent things: A "graphical" JVM type
byte-code, plus some compputer languages to handle that.

  Hans Aberg
                  * Email: Hans Aberg <mailto:haberg@member.ams.org>
                  * Home Page: <http://www.matematik.su.se/~haberg/>
                  * AMS member listing: <http://www.ams.org/cml/>