On Tue, 23 Sep 2014, Ross Moore wrote: > It is the insistence on being able to reproduce the PDF > *automatically from source* that is where the problem lies.
>From reading Norbert's Web blog, it appears that that's also an issue for Debian packaging of TeX-related software. Debian has a formal requirement for everything that can possibly be built from source, to be built from source, and it's not practical to do that automatically with many TeX-related documentation files. My own horoscop LaTeX package, whose documentation requires many megabytes of astrological software (free, but not typically packaged by Linux distributions) to compile properly, is only one example. I think there are other packages that exist specifically to support expensive commercial products and require those products in order to compile, notwithstanding that the results of compilation are free to distribute. This kind of thing is definitely a problem; I'm not sure it is TeX's problem. As for arXiv, what bothers me is that in the case of XeLaTeX, they will accept neither the source code *nor* the compiled PDF. All an author can do is circumvent the rules by lying in the document metadata, or else go through contortions to compile a special arXiv-only version with some other software. I found this page helpful in my efforts to do that: http://member.ipmu.jp/yuji.tachikawa/cjk-on-arxiv/ -- Matthew Skala [email protected] People before principles. http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/ -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
