The computer program pdfTeX is an extension of Knuth 's typesetting program TeX , and was originally written and developed into a publicly usable product by Hàn Thế Thành as a part of the work for his PhD thesis at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University , Brno , Czech Republic . The idea of making this extension to TeX was conceived during the early 1990s, when Jiří Zlatuška and Phil Taylor discussed some developmental ideas with Donald Knuth at Stanford University . Knuth later met Hàn Thế Thành in Brno during his visit to the Faculty of Informatics to receive an honorary doctorate from Masaryk University.
6-509: Two prominent characteristics of pdfTeX are character protrusion, which generalizes the concept of hanging punctuation , and font expansion, an implementation of Hermann Zapf 's ideas for improving the grayness of a typeset page. Both extend the core paragraph breaking routine. They are discussed in Thành's PhD thesis. pdfTeX is included in most modern distributions of LaTeX and ConTeXt (including TeX Live , MacTeX , and MiKTeX ) and used as
12-520: Is no longer functional, and one has to use a program such as eps2pdf to convert EPS files to PDF, which can then be directly inserted by pdfTeX. It is possible to obtain DVI output from pdfTeX. This DVI output should be identical to that of TeX, unless pdfTeX's extra microtypography features have been activated. Moreover, since LaTeX, ConTeXt et al. are simply macro packages for TeX, they work equally well with pdfTeX. Hence, pdflatex , for example, calls
18-509: The default TeX engine. The main difference between TeX and pdfTeX is that whereas TeX outputs DVI files, pdfTeX can output PDF files directly. This allows tight integration of PDF features such as hypertext links and tables of contents, using packages such as hyperref . On the other hand, packages (such as PSTricks ) which exploit the earlier conversion process of DVI-to- PostScript may fail, although replacements such as PGF/TikZ have been written. Direct embedding of PostScript graphics
24-627: The designer or typographer, or the use of drawing software which supports this feature, or the use of sophisticated typesetting tools. PdfTeX , a variant of the TeX typesetting program, has microtypographic capabilities that allow for semi-automatic hanging punctuation. Arbortext APP (formerly 3B2), QuarkXPress , Adobe InDesign and Corel Ventura are desktop publishing applications which offer automatic support for hanging punctuation. The blogging platform Medium implemented hanging quotes in 2014. A proposal to add hanging punctuation property to CSS
30-632: The edge so that they do not disrupt the ‘flow’ of a body of text or ‘break’ the margin of alignment . It is so called because the punctuation appears to hang in the margin of the text and is not incorporated into the block or column of text. It is commonly used when text is fully justified . The style was used by Gutenberg in the Gutenberg Bible , the first book printed in Europe. Few desktop publishing applications allow for automatic hanging punctuation. This often requires manual intervention by
36-509: The pdfTeX program using the standard LaTeX macros to typeset LaTeX documents, whereas it was the default rendering engine for ConTeXt documents. Current versions of ConTeXt use LuaMetaTeX as default rendering engine. pdfTeX has several features not available in standard TeX: Hanging punctuation Hanging punctuation or exdentation is a microtypographic technique of typesetting punctuation marks and bullet points , most commonly quotation marks and hyphens , further towards
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