Hello,

I was reading about the history of ConTeXt in the Not So Short Introduction To ConTeXt and I have a historical question. I noticed that the PDF specification was published in 1993 yet ConTeXt was invented in 1991. The book suggests that PDF output was handled by the PdfTeX engine in MKII in 2005. What sort of output did the software produce before PdfTeX was introduced? Was this the same as the output produced by the software before the publication of the PDF specification? 2005 is when we started with luatex which is a follow up on pdftex, and

On 4/13/2024 2:12 PM, Riviera Taylor wrote: pdftex is more a mid 90's thing; we immediately adopted pdftex (which made some believe that context depended on pdftex which is not true) anyway, we started with dvi which needs a postprocessor to go to some printer format like specific hp or more general postscript but also can drive viewers we went from epson dot matrix printer -> early 300 dpi laser -> 600 dpi laser printer -> high speed oce 512 dpi printer (metric) -> high speed oce 600 dpi printer (+ crappy canon color laser printer) -> fast page-wide hp color inkjet office printer in mkii all is controlled by backend drivers, that use so called specials to support color, hyperlinks, images so a workflow can have - dvipsone : high quality postscript - dviwindo : viewer with typeone support and hyperlinks - acrobat : postscript to pdf and as all these external backends have their demands we could handle all these things in an abstract way (that way one could also drive printer properties like duplex or paper bins etc from a tex job) that meant that when pdf came around we could almost immediately support most of the interactive features in a dvi -> ps -> acrobat workflow when pdftex came around the intermediate step of postscript could be avoided which btw was also possible with dvipdfm(x) so we also supported that so to summarize, it went from tex -> dvi -> printer format tex -> dvi -> postscript -> more generic printer format tex -> dvi -> pdf -> print from acrobat tex -> pdf -> print from pdf viewer in the meantime we are pdf (as from that one can produce other formats) Hans (btw, the fact that we could easily support pdf was also a reason why at that time some adobe folk in nl used documents produced by context to show somewhat extrems usage of interactive features, thanks to the fact that tex can adapt to such new situations, also via the dvi route in this case with pdfmarks; at that time pdf usage - and features - was a bit more dualistic: ps replacement format versus storage and preview format, but that's a different story; but it still shows in how the standard evolved) ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | www.pragma-ade.nl | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------