[tex-live] [pdftex] PDF 1.5 by default in TL 2010

George N. White III gnwiii at gmail.com
Wed Jan 13 17:13:35 CET 2010


On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 11:38 AM, James Quirk <jjq at galcit.caltech.edu> wrote:

> On Wed, 13 Jan 2010, Jim Diamond wrote:
>
>> If this is (easily) do-able under your favourite OS, could you write a
>> program which, when given a PDF, Does The Right Thing and calls either
>> AA 5 or AR 9 (or whatever) on the file, as appropriate?  And then
>> associate this program with '.pdf' ?
> If you're going to go that route, it's also possible to have the program
> do conversion from PDF1.5 to PDF1.4, or whatever, before it passes the
> document to the viewer. It's more involved, but still do-able. And with
> the speed of today's machines, hardly noticeable in the overhead it
> introduces.


This Ubuntu 9.10 system has:

/usr/bin/gnome-open /usr/bin/gvfs-open  /usr/bin/kde-open  /usr/bin/xdg-open

These open .pdf with with okular or evince, but If I'm not using the "expected"
window system or an ssh tunnel I often get messages like:
** (evince:26606): WARNING **: Failed to create dbus proxy for
org.gnome.SettingsDaemon: Could not get owner of name
'org.gnome.SettingsDaemon': no such name

Mac OS X has an "open" command.

1) Such tools are "expected" to be available in current desktop environments
2) These tools are useful to people who have never heard of TeX

These tools should do some checks beyond looking at the extension to match
a file with a suitable application.   I don't know if anyone has
written similar
utilities for Windows.

I would prefer to see the XX-open tools improved so they deal with issues
such as matching pdf files with appropriate applications.  It doesn't make
sense for TL to work around problems with these tools as the problems
affect people who won't be installing TL.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia



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