__NOTOC__
The
computer program
A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to Execution (computing), execute. Computer programs are one component of software, which also includes software documentation, documentation and oth ...
pdfTeX is an extension of
Knuth's typesetting program
TeX, 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
Masaryk University (MU) ( cs, Masarykova univerzita; la, Universitas Masarykiana Brunensis) is the second largest university in the Czech Republic, a member of the Compostela Group and the Utrecht Network. Founded in 1919 in Brno as the se ...
,
Brno
Brno ( , ; german: Brünn ) is a city in the South Moravian Region of the Czech Republic. Located at the confluence of the Svitava and Svratka rivers, Brno has about 380,000 inhabitants, making it the second-largest city in the Czech Republic ...
,
Czech Republic
The Czech Republic, or simply Czechia, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Historically known as Bohemia, it is bordered by Austria to the south, Germany to the west, Poland to the northeast, and Slovakia to the southeast. The ...
. The idea of making this extension to TeX was conceived during the early 1990s, when
Jiří Zlatuška
Jiří Zlatuška (born 15 September 1957 in Brno) is a Czech informaticist, university professor and politician. He was elected in the parliamentary election in 2013 to the Chamber of Deputies on the ANO 2011 platform. From 2015 to 2019 he was D ...
and
Phil Taylor discussed some developmental ideas with
Donald Knuth
Donald Ervin Knuth ( ; born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer sc ...
at
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...
. Knuth later met Hàn Thế Thành in Brno during his visit to the Faculty of Informatics to receive an honorary doctorate from Masaryk University.
Two prominent characteristics of pdfTeX are character protrusion, which generalizes the concept of
hanging punctuation, and font expansion, an implementation of
Hermann Zapf
Hermann Zapf (; 8 November 1918 – 4 June 2015) was a German type designer and calligrapher who lived in Darmstadt, Germany. He was married to the calligrapher and typeface designer Gudrun Zapf-von Hesse. Typefaces he designed include ...
'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.
pdfTeX is included in most modern distributions of
LaTeX
Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latexes are found in nature, but synthetic latexes are common as well.
In nature, latex is found as a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosperms ...
and
ConTeXt
Context may refer to:
* Context (language use), the relevant constraints of the communicative situation that influence language use, language variation, and discourse summary
Computing
* Context (computing), the virtual environment required to s ...
(including
TeX Live,
MacTeX, and
MiKTeX) and used as the default TeX engine.
Christian Schenk : MiKTeX 2.5: pdfetex becomes default engine
The main difference between TeX and pdfTeX is that whereas TeX outputs DVI
Digital Visual Interface (DVI) is a video display interface developed by the Digital Display Working Group (DDWG). The digital interface is used to connect a video source, such as a video display controller, to a display device, such as a comp ...
files, pdfTeX can output PDF
Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...
files directly. This allows tight integration of PDF features such as hypertext
Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references ( hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typically ...
links and tables of contents, using packages such as hyperref. On the other hand, packages (such as PSTricks) which exploit the earlier conversion process of DVI-to-PostScript
PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Do ...
may fail, although replacements such as PGF/TikZ
PGF/Ti''k''Z is a pair of languages for producing vector graphics (e.g., technical illustrations and drawings) from a geometric/algebraic description, with standard features including the drawing of points, lines, arrows, paths, circles, ellipse ...
have 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 extra microtypography features have been activated. Moreover, since LaTeX, ConTeXt ''et al.'' are simply macro packages 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 is the default rendering engine for ConTeXt documents.
Features
pdfTeX has several features not available in standard TeX:
* Native TrueType
TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the most common format for fonts on the classic Mac OS, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating ...
and Type 1 font
PostScript fonts are font files encoded in outline font specifications developed by Adobe Systems for professional digital typesetting. This system uses PostScript file format to encode font information.
"PostScript fonts" may also separately be ...
embedding
* Micro-typographic extensions such as margin kerning
In typography, kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between characters in a proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result. Kerning adjusts the space between individual letterforms, while tracking (letter-spacin ...
and font expansion
* Direct access to PDF-specific features such as hyperlinks, tables of contents and document information
See also
* List of TeX extensions
TeX is a free typesetting system for which many extensions have been developed.
Languages
* ArabTeX – adds support for Hebrew and Arabic alphabets
* FarsiTeX – adds support for Farsi
* Omega (TeX) – extends multilinguality by usi ...
* List of PDF software
This is a list of links to articles on software used to manage Portable Document Format (PDF) documents. The distinction between the various functions is not entirely clear-cut; for example, some viewers allow adding of annotations, signatures, e ...
* LuaTeX
LuaTeX is a TeX-based computer typesetting system which started as a version of pdfTeX with a Lua scripting engine embedded. After some experiments it was adopted by the TeX Live distribution as a successor to pdfTeX (itself an extension of ε- ...
* XeTeX
References
External links
pdfTeX project page
pdfTeX manual
Micro-typographic extensions to the TeX typesetting system
- dissertation by Hàn Thế Thành
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pdftex
Free PDF software
Free TeX software