Making Acrobat documents from LaTeX

There are now two general routes to Acrobat output: Adobe's original `distillation' route, and the use of PDFTeX (see the PDFTeX project).

For simple documents (with no hyper-references), you can either

• distill `ordinary' PostScript output of your document, or (on a Windows or Macintosh machine with Acrobat Exchange installed) pass it through the PDFwriter in place of a printer, or
• process with PDFTeX, enabling Acrobat output.

To translate all the LaTeX cross-referencing into Acrobat links, you need a LaTeX package to suitably redefine the internal commands. There are two of these for LaTeX2e, both based on the HyperTeX specification (see Making hypertext documents from TeX): Sebastian Rahtz's hyperref (available from macros/latex/contrib/supported/hyperref), and Michael Mehlich's hyper (available from macros/latex/contrib/supported/hyper). Hyperref can operate using PDFTeX primitives rather than the hyperTeX conventions. You can use dvips or Y&Y's \PROGNAME|DVIPSONE| to translate the DVI into PostScript acceptable to Distiller.

Sadly, there is no free implementation of all of Distiller's functionality, but GhostScript (version 4.00 onwards) provide some restricted distilling capability, and Distiller itself is now remarkably cheap (for academics at least).

Adobe's Acrobat Reader is available for a very wide range of platforms. For those still omitted, GhostScript (versions 3.51 onwards) can display and print PDF files.

Work on a DVI to PDF translator is in progress, but shows no sign of immediate release (Sergey Lesenko spoke about the work at TUG'96 and hopes to speak about it again at TUG'97).