Mike, I think there may be some confusion here. Adobe Acrobat 8 costs about $450, and it will produce pdf files from various inputs. I assume at this price, it will produce files that Adobe Reader 8 displays properly. Adobe Reader 8 is free, but it only has the capability of displaying pdf files, not creating them. I wonder if it is Reader that's the culprit here, by not displaying the ligatures you list properly if the files are created by some method that doesn't use Acrobat. If so, there's no need to abandon pdf as a preferred format - just caution users to view them in Acrobat 7 until Adobe "fixes the problem" (sic). In particular, using the now- standard methods built into most (La)TeX distributions should still generate pdf files that will display correctly on most pdf apps - Preview.app for Macs and xpdf for Linux or other UNIX-based systems. No longer being a Windows user, I am not sure what alternative pdf file viewers are available for it, but this seems an ideal opportunity for someone to create one to fill an obvious need. In any case, using dvi as the preferred format has its drawbacks. Notably, it is binary, and hence can't be included in emails without extra effort. It also generates files that usually are considerably larger than corresponding pdf files, which makes sending them as email attachments a problem: most email servers now limit the size of attachments (the server at Tulane, which is admittedly more restrictive than most, simply throws such emails away, warning neither the sender nor the receiver), which forces one to place the files online for others to download them. In any case, I think more research is needed before a move like the one you are proposing for TAC is warranted. And, I'd be interested to know the exact nature of the problem. Best regards, Mike On Oct 28, 2007, at 2:06 PM, Michael Barr wrote:
Whatever you do, do not upgrade to Adobe reader 8. I found this on the texhax list.
Has anyone else been clobbered by the discovery that Adobe Acrobat 8 tacitly suppresses all ligature glyphs of the fi, fl, ff, ffi, and ffl sort and displays blanks in their place. They do this without warning, so that a file which displays perfectly well in Acrobat 7 is made unreadable in Acrobat 8.
It turns out that files converted (from the ps file) by the distiller (which costs something like $500) do not have this problem. I guess Adobe is tired of free use of their format. At TAC, we still consider the dvi to be the official format.
Michael
=============================================== Professor Michael Mislove Phone: +1 504 862-3441 Department of Mathematics FAX: +1 504 865-5063 Tulane University URL: http://www.math.tulane.edu/~mwm New Orleans, LA 70118 USA ===============================================