Revisiting inclusion of AcroTeX/eForms in TeX Live in light of advancements in libre PDF readers

[Max Chernoff]

Hi Karl,

On Mon, 2024-06-03 at 15:35 -0600, karl at freefriends.org wrote:
> AcroTeX et al. are problematic not just because of the reader end, but
> also because of the writer end, some of which required Adobe software.
> The author (Donald Story) was (understandably) not interested in teasing
> out the proprietary-required stuff from the non-proprietary-required
> stuff. He eventually told me "just don't put my packages in TeX Live".
> He passed away in 2022, and I haven't seen any notes about further
> development from other people.

>From what I can tell by quickly looking through the code, I *think* that
all of the proprietary-support code (at TeX compile time) is in
epdfmark.def; the rest appears to support only libre writers. I'm not
sure if every single viewer function in AcroTeX is supported by libre
viewers, but they're all at least documented in the PDF specification
(which is vaguely free-ish).

So if you're only concerned about proprietary-support runtime code, then
you should *probably* be fine by just deleting epdfmark.def; if having
proprietary-support code mentioned in the docs and source is a problem,
then it would be really complicated to remove all that. 

Thanks,
-- Max