On Mon, Dec 14, 1998 at 10:18:24PM +0100, Hans Aberg wrote: > >I don't understand the question. > >Since TeX does not understand graphics in any format while pdfTeX does, > >there is obviously a modification, as indeed is clear from pdftex.ch > Depending wether the way of TeX parsing is changed, or if it merely > compiles to PDF instead of DVI. By TeX I mean the program defined by Knuth's tex.web . To use it in any other sense will simply cause confusion. > >However, my main point was that since pdftex is a single monolithic program, > >every additional graphics format -- PDF, PS, TIFF, etc -- > >must involve further modification to pdfTeX itself. > > This is however a core question: So does PDF not itself allow inclusion of > other formats like say GIF, JPEG? I don't think it allows GIFs in any sense; it does allow suitably wrapped JPEG (DCTEncoding). However, you would still need to modify pdfTeX to create the PDF object encapsulating a JPEG (as I am sure Thanh will do in time, if he hasn't already). > >> But will an extended DVI suffice as a new byte-code for WWW publishing? I don't know what that means; I take it that any format in the world can be sent over the "Web". Whether a particular program (browser) can display it is simply up to the program. There is nothing special about browsers, as far as I can see. xdvi is a program that can display remote DVIs; if enough people used it like this it would be called a browser. > >I take more or less the opposite view to that generally expressed here. > >In my view, it is up to browsers to accept > >generally accepted formats like PDF or DVI -- > >it's not up to the outside world > >to try to convert information into the format expected by the browser. > > If you want it that way, you still need a WWW byte-code that allows the > inclusion of such formats. So you are back to the same problem. I don't know what a "WWW byte-code" is, and so I don't understand the rest of your posting. Browsers already "understand" DVI, in the sense that you can set them to run a particular program when they meet a file called foo.dvi . They could be a bit more graceful about it; and I expect they soon will be. The idea that we have to write in HTML -- or any *ML -- because Microsoft and Netscape say so I find bizarre in the extreme; it's like saying we must wear brown shoes if we want to go abroad. -- Timothy Murphy e-mail: [log in to unmask] tel: +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland