[25964] in Athena Bugs
Re: request for pdflatex upgrade
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Garry Zacheiss)
Wed Aug 18 17:20:56 2004
Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2004 17:20:43 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <200408182120.i7ILKhg1028195@w92-spare-sunblade-100.mit.edu>
From: Garry Zacheiss <zacheiss@mit.edu>
To: Alex T Prengel <alexp@mit.edu>
In-reply-to: "[25933] in Athena Bugs"
cc: bugs@mit.edu
Errors-To: bugs-bounces@mit.edu
>However, we exchange several of these with athena based programs and
>usually incorporate them using
>
>PDFLATEX
>
>the problem is now I receive error messages saying my pdf files are
>version 1.5 and that pdflatex only supports up to 1.4.
>
>Is there anyway to upgrade pdflatex on athena to support this newest
>version of adobe acrobat?
I looked into this a little today, following up on the pointer Jacob
sent. Here's what I discovered:
- Ideally, we would modify our latex installation to not complain. The
web recommends setting "pdf_inclusion_errorlevel 0" in pdftex.cfg
(currently in /usr/athena/share/texmf/pdftex/config) to accomplish
this.
Unfortunately, that was added in the version of pdftex after the one
we're running, so no dice, and I doubt we want to upgrade for 9.3 just
for this.
- There is a "pdf_minorversion 4" in pdftex.cfg that can be changed.
Setting it to 5 causes it to accept PDF 1.5 documents without
complaint, and to generate things that claim to be PDF 1.5 but adhere
to the 1.4 specification. Sadly, opening something claiming to be a
version 1.5 PDF in Acrobat 5 puts up a warning dialog even if the
document uses no 1.5 specific features, so that won't fly either.
- The best answer, I think, ends up involving asking the user to do
something differently. One can open PDF 1.5 documents in Acrobat 6,
select File -> Reduce File Size... and select making the resulting
file compatible with Acrobat 5, which will cause it to write out a PDF
1.4 file, which pdflatex supports.
I would recommend passing on this last option to the user as their best
option for the time being.
Garry
