Reason for PDF Format

[Russ Allbery]

Ron Echeverri <rone at B1FF.nas.nasa.gov> writes:

> The reader is free.  But the PDF creator is not.

Yes, it is.  pdftex and pdflatex are free and work reasonably well.  The
Computer Modern PostScript fonts are freely available, and it's possible
to get free Times and Helvetica fonts without too much difficulty (plus
they're built into most printers).

It used to be that you had to have a distiller from Adobe, but you don't
any more if you can work in TeX and LaTeX with a somewhat restricted set
of available fonts.  The PDF hyperlink support isn't complete yet, but
it's coming along.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)         <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>