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
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
\specials, 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
ProcessPreview” become
rather clumsy — gsview
doesn't make the same mistake.
