At 17:08 +0000 1998/12/14, Timothy Murphy wrote:
>I believe the discussion here, and on the pdftex mailing list,
>provide very strong arguments for using a "mid-language" like DVI.
>It's madness, in my view, to modify the TeX engine
>in order to allow inclusion of particular graphic formats.

What modifications do they do in pdfTeX?

Otherwise, a weakness of TeX is of course that it does not handle inclusion
of other formats well, that there is no standard for: My guess is that one
should perhaps use an IDL API, defining the positioning of the inline
graphics.

If TeX should handle such new primitives, then TeX needs something more
radical than merely an extension.

>While Thanh's pdfTeX is a marvellous piece of work,
>which satisfied an urgent need,
>in my view it is fundamentally misconceived,
>and will in time be replaced by a version based on possibly extended DVI.

But will an extended DVI suffice as a new byte-code for WWW publishing?

  Hans Aberg
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