Message-ID:  <199812172229.RAA20657@hilbert.math.albany.edu>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Date:         Thu, 17 Dec 1998 17:29:57 -0500
From: "William F. Hammond" <hammond@CSC.ALBANY.EDU>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
              <LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Subject:      Re: portable LaTeX
Status: R

Berthold Horn writes:

> Not sure I get it.  The Acrobat Reader is free.
> And on platforms that support printers you can print
> from Acrobat Reader to anything that comes with a
> working printer driver.  No need to be rich, as far as I can see.
> Nor any need to buy extra stuff from Adobe or anyone else.

LaTeX is for authors.  In order for an author to get into high quality
PDF, it would seem that either he needs to pay the tax or he needs to
use pdftex.  (I have not tried the latter.  Did I miss something?)

If one construes the "level" of a format as its position in the
(pseudo) directed graph (not a tree) of all possible formats, where
the "arrows" between vertices represent "faithful" translations, then
dvi format is a higher level format than either postscript or pdf.

This concept of "level" is not precisely specified unless "faithful"
is precisely specified, and even then one must be aware of the
possibility of "backward" transformations of format that are not
"inverses".

One keeps one options open maximally by keeping one's level as high as
possible at every stage.

As far as I know, dvi is a higher level format than either of the
Adobe formats.  Moreover, writing "dvi" is not taxed in any way.  That
said, dvi viewing is just not very well distributed.  That's too bad,
because I find "xdvi", when suited to the task, much more pleasant to
use than any pdf or postscript reader that I have seen.  (But isn't
it now included in one or more of the linux distributions.)

Perhaps if some of the dvi specials now in mainstream use were adopted
officially, those who code dvi viewers would have more incentive to
add features.

But this is getting off topic, isn't it.

                                   -- Bill