| pdfTeX | |
|---|---|
| Original author | Hàn Thế Thành |
| Developer | The pdfTeX team |
| Stable release | 1.40.29 / January 18, 2026 |
| Operating system | Multiplatform |
| Type | Typesetting |
| License | GNU General Public License |
| Website | www |
| Repository | |
Thecomputer programpdfTeX, sometimes typeset aspdfTeX, is an extension ofKnuth's typesetting programTeX, and was originally written and developed into a publicly usable product byHàn Thế Thành [de] as a part of the work for his PhD thesis at the Faculty of Informatics,Masaryk University,Brno,Czech Republic. The idea of making this extension to TeX was conceived during the early 1990s, whenJiří Zlatuška andPhil Taylor discussed some developmental ideas withDonald Knuth atStanford University. Knuth later met Hàn Thế Thành in Brno during his visit to the Faculty of Informatics to receive an honorary doctorate from Masaryk University.
Two prominent characteristics of pdfTeX are character protrusion, which generalizes the concept ofhanging punctuation, and font expansion, an implementation ofHermann Zapf's ideas for improving the grayness of a typeset page. Both extend the core paragraph breaking routine. They are discussed in Thành's PhD thesis.[1]
pdfTeX is included in most modern distributions ofLaTeX andConTeXt (includingTeX Live,MacTeX, andMiKTeX)[2] and used as the default TeX engine.[3][4] The main difference between TeX and pdfTeX is that whereas TeX outputsDVI files, pdfTeX can outputPDF files directly. This allows tight integration of PDF features such ashypertext links and tables of contents, using packages such ashyperref. On the other hand, packages (such asPSTricks) which exploit the earlier conversion process of DVI-to-PostScript may fail, although replacements such asPGF/TikZ have been written. Direct embedding of PostScript graphics is no longer functional, and one has to use a program such as eps2pdf to convert EPS files to PDF, which can then be directly inserted by pdfTeX.
It is possible to obtain DVI output from pdfTeX. This DVI output should be identical to that of TeX, unless pdfTeX's extramicrotypography features have been activated. Moreover, since LaTeX, ConTeXtet al. are simplymacro packages for TeX, they work equally well with pdfTeX. Hence,pdflatex, for example, calls the pdfTeX program using the standard LaTeX macros to typeset LaTeX documents, whereas it was the default rendering engine for ConTeXt documents. Current versions of ConTeXt useLuaMetaTeX as default rendering engine.[5]
pdfTeX has several features not available in standard TeX:
