More on Adobe reader 8

More on Adobe reader 8

[Michael Barr]

A man named Pierre McKay, one of the real tex gurus has now written that a
large archive of files rendered into pdf by Ghostcript are now unreadable
in Reader 8.  My main point is that dvi should remain our ultimate format.
Even when the viewers do not render the dvi file correctly, all the
information is there and can be converted to pdf by whatever converter we
have available.  And authors should be encouraged to provide, if at all
possible, files that do render properly in dvi format.  This means avoid
rotated letters and avoid, I much regret to say, diagram packages that
work properly only in ps or pdf format.  One of the things that makes
xypic (not to mention packages based on it) so remarkable is that it
manages to do all it does without using such tricks.

Michael

Re: More on Adobe reader 8

[Vaughan Pratt]

Mike may have a point here.  dvi has the advantage over pdf that Latin
has over English, it's not evolving as fast.  (Not that Latin didn't
evolve: in two millennia it went from classical to medieval and
ecclesiastical, the latter being today the official language of the
Vatican City.)

Of the sequence .tex -> .dvi -> .ps -> .pdf, it's a nice question which
is the most appropriate archival medium.  Perhaps the best strategy for
future archivists is to archive all four, which already seems to be
becoming the custom on some archives.

However there should be a consensus as to what defines each of these
formats.  How do we know that Ghostscript-produced pdf is the same
format as what pdflatex or ps2pdf or dvipdfm produces?  It's relatively
easy to get a pdf distiller to work with current releases of pdf
readers, it is harder to get it to adhere to standards designed to
survive upgrades of those readers, which may be the root cause of the
present incident.

How to rescue archives whose format has become obsolete, whether through
using a nonrobust distiller or some other cause of software rot, is then
an excellent question.  The idea that we should all stick to Adobe
Acrobat Reader 7.0 in perpetuity somehow doesn't sound optimal---what
pdf's produced in 2017 will 7.0 be able to read?

Vaughan

Michael Barr wrote:
> A man named Pierre McKay, one of the real tex gurus has now written that a
> large archive of files rendered into pdf by Ghostcript are now unreadable
> in Reader 8.  My main point is that dvi should remain our ultimate format.
> Even when the viewers do not render the dvi file correctly, all the
> information is there and can be converted to pdf by whatever converter we
> have available.  And authors should be encouraged to provide, if at all
> possible, files that do render properly in dvi format.  This means avoid
> rotated letters and avoid, I much regret to say, diagram packages that
> work properly only in ps or pdf format.  One of the things that makes
> xypic (not to mention packages based on it) so remarkable is that it
> manages to do all it does without using such tricks.
>
> Michael
>
>