__NOTOC__
The
computer program
A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to execute. Computer programs are one component of software, which also includes documentation and other intangible components.
A computer program ...
pdfTeX is an extension of
Knuth's typesetting program
TeX
Tex may refer to:
People and fictional characters
* Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname
* Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer Joseph Arrington Jr.
Entertainment
* ''Tex'', the Italian ...
, 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,
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. 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
Hanging punctuation or exdentation is a microtypographic technique of typesetting punctuation marks and bullet points, most commonly quotation marks and hyphens, further towards the edge so that they do not disrupt the ‘flow’ of a body of te ...
, and font expansion, an implementation of
Hermann Zapf'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 su ...
(including
TeX Live
TeX Live is a cross-platform, free software distribution for the TeX typesetting system that includes major TeX-related programs, macro packages, and fonts. It is the replacement of its no-longer supported counterpart teTeX.
It is now the def ...
,
MacTeX, and
MiKTeX
MiKTeX is a free and open-source distribution of the TeX/LaTeX typesetting system for Microsoft Windows (and for Mac and certain Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora). It also contains a set of related programs. MiKTeX provides ...
) 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 files, pdfTeX can output PDF files directly. This allows tight integration of PDF features such as hypertext 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 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 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