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the best way to have and edit your own web page in dos (Announce)

posted by rr Homepage E-mail, Berlin, Germany, 08.02.2024, 22:34

> Now, I'm wanting to distribute the documentation in text and PDF (including
> hyperlinks), and possibly in HTML as well (but I'm not sure about that).
> I've started using MS-Word (Windows) to create the original document which
> can output PDF, HTML, and plain text from the same original Word source
> document (with the right incantations).
Why do you want PDF at all?

> The problem is that it Word only creates later versions of the PDF
> standard. I want to ultimately generate version 1.0 PDF documents so that
> they can be viewed in the original Acrobat Reader for DOS (which only
> understands PDF version 1.0). I've found at least one PDF version
> converter program that claims to output PDF 1.0 documents, but I can't get
> the DOS PDF program to read them. I suspect it's not really generating
> version 1.0 compatible documents, but it could also be I don't have the
> Adobe software installed correctly.
What's the name of this converter?

> I was looking at one of the PDF documents you created and it is version
> 1.3, so I suspect Halibut only outputs PDF version 1.3.
Indeed. Halibut always creates PDF version 1.3 files. (see bk_pdf.c#l686)

> Does anybody know of a way to create or convert PDF version 1.0 documents?

You can create PDF version 1.0 files with a text editor. Yes, it's possible, but no fun. Details can be found in this series of articles: Make your own PDF file – Part 1: PDF Objects and Data Types

Also here: How to create a simple PDF file

And here: Minimal PDF

The 1993 Portable Document Format Reference Manual also has a "Hello world" example on page 161 (175).

> All I need is plain text and hyperlinks, which PDF version 1.0 supports
> just fine.
Halibut is FOSS. You "just" need to strip the PDF version 1.3 features down to version 1.0.

There also is the FOSS william8000/lout: Lout Document Formatting System, which produces PDF version 1.2 files.

An overview of features added to each PDF version is at, e.g., PDF versions | The scope of each PDF version.

Examine the internal structure of a PDF file: Inspect PDF file - Free online tool - pdfux

mupdf is another PDF viewer: FLTK for DOS - Apps - XFDOS distro - Browse /Applications/Binary versions of FLTK applications at SourceForge.net

Further discussion about this idea is probably worth a separate topic.

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