Sorry, I accidentally sent the previous mail before it was ready. There is another point I'd like to put on my wish list. When Knuth developed TeX, he obviously did not take into account that people want to pipe STDOUT into other programs. It would be nice to have an option "-q" or "--quiet" which instructs TeX to suppress any output except what is reqested implicitly by \write16, for instance. If you want to determine the number of pages in a particular pdf file, you can say pdftex '\pdfximage page 1 {file.pdf}\write16{\the\pdflastximagepages}\end' but you get a lot of more or less useless messages and have to filter the output somehow. Regards, Reinhard -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reinhard Kotucha Phone: +49-511-4592165 Marschnerstr. 25 D-30167 Hannover mailto:reinhard.kotucha@web.de ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------