At 19:05 +0000 1998/12/14, Timothy Murphy wrote: >> >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? > >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. >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? >> But will an extended DVI suffice as a new byte-code for WWW publishing? > >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 would expect browsers to define something like a Java interface, >with the understanding that they will display anything >which implements this interface. That is already outdated as a computer language technique: One uses something called an IDL (Interface Definition Language), which defines an abtsract language for such purposes. (See for example the ASDL <http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~danwang/Papers/dsl97-abstract.html>.) However, that is on the (higher) computer language level. The byte-code level is the JVM (Java Virtual Machine), which seems to correspond to the (extended) DVI, PDF and such formats. So I think you need two wholly independent things: A "graphical" JVM type byte-code, plus some compputer languages to handle that. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg <mailto:[log in to unmask]> * Home Page: <http://www.matematik.su.se/~haberg/> * AMS member listing: <http://www.ams.org/cml/>