Packaging acrotex with TeX Live

[Jim Diamond]

On Mon, Oct 12, 2020 at 11:08 (+0200), Zdenek Wagner wrote:

> po 12. 10. 2020 v 9:56 odesílatel Ulrike Fischer <news3 at nililand.de> napsal:

>> Am Sun, 11 Oct 2020 15:35:37 -0600 schrieb Karl Berry:

>>> Ulrike: I know the standard is open, but if the practical reality is
>>> that it is only nonfree software that supports feature XYZ, it wouldn't
>>> be right to include packages whose main purpose is to deal with feature
>>> XYZ.  This has always been the case with TeX Live (and teTeX and tex-k
>>> before that).


>> Sure but the fact that the standard is open since quite some time
>> means that the probability that only "nonfree viewers" supports  a
>> feature requested by enough people is quite low. And as expected
>> searching a bit gives lots of hits outside adobe.

> Unfortunately this is not the case. The Linux version of Acrobat
> Reader 9 depends on obsolete libraries, their support was discontinued
> a few years ago and can no longer be installed.

That is not true.  I recently got Acrobat reader 9.5.5 running on
Slackware64-current (which is very up to date, unlike Slackware 14.2,
the most recent "released" version of Slackware).  To get it running
there I needed to install some 32-compatibility stuff (which, as I
understand it, many 64-bit Linux distributions install by default),
but that was about it.

I don't know if you said earlier which Linux distro / version you use,
but perhaps installing Acroread is not as impossible as you think.

Having said that, I agree it would be nice if Adobe would create an
updated version for Linux.

                                Jim