[DVIPDFMx] dvipdfmx and pdf1.4

[Jin-Hwan Cho]

On Mar 27, 2010, at 9:40 AM, Karl Berry wrote:

> Hi ChoF --
> 
> Sorry, I can't remember if we already talked about this.  Is there an
> dvipdfmx special or other method of telling (x)dvipdfmx to generate pdf
> 1.4, from the document level?  I asked Jonathan (Kew) first and he said
> you were the one to check with :).

Yes, I remember that there was a discussion on last December about the same topic.
At that time Matthias suggested a new special "pdf: minorversion m" but we didn't finish
the discussion. It means that the special is not implemented yet.

> To recap the story, which I think you've seen ... for TeX Live 2010, we
> plan to change the default for pdf(la)tex and (x)dvipdfmx to pdf1.5
> (\pdfminorversion=5, V=5 in dvipdfmx.cfg), so we can enable object
> compression.  Seems everything non-TeXish has been doing it for ages.
> 
> But of course some people will still want to generate 1.4.  So we
> thought we'd have a pkg so people can do \usepackage{pdf14}, which is
> simple and understandable (vs. Install-time options, which are neither).
> 
> Manuel has written a first cut at that package for pdftex and luatex.
> It'd be nice if it could support xetex too.

Assume that a new special "pdf: minorversion" is implemented in DVIPDFMx.
Then there are two ways.

1. (XeTeX+xdvipdfmx) One way is to implement a new primitive \pdfminorversion
    that sends an option "-V 5" to xdvipdfmx. Another way is to do nothing and just
    use the new special command.

2. (LaTeX+dvipdfmx) There is only one way using the new special command.

I will implement the new special as soon as possible.

Do you have any comment, Matthias and Jonathan?

Best regards, ChoF.