Re: PDF version 1.4 & XeTeX

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Wednesday 16 May 2007 04:47, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm posting a bit weird question here. A user on the XeTeX mailing
> list reported a problem, because XeTeX doesn't know how to interpret
> PDF version 1.4 and thus he wasn't able to include a gnuplot-generated
> (set term pdf) graph into his LaTeX document.

PDF	Acrobat Version
1.3	Acrobat 4
1.4	Acrobat 5	
1.5	Acrobat 6
1.6	Acrobat 7
 
> My question is: is version 1.4 needed for some reason (advanced
> functionality, apart from smaller PDF files)? I.e: would it still work
> if one decided to lower the PDF version to 1.3 for example and
> recompiled gnuplot manually?

According to the PDFLib manual, PDF Version 1.4 is needed for 
transparency, pattern-fill, and shading.   I don't know exactly what
would happen if you forced the compatibility level to 1.3 and then tried
to create a plot that used these features.

> (x)dvipdfm(x) will have to be improved sooner or later, and there are
> other means to help (lower the version with acrobat etc.), but I'm
> just curious if there are means to lower the version from withing
> gnuplot ...

If you link to a very old version of PDFlib this will happen automatically.
If you link to a more recent version, gnuplot requests compatibility
level 1.4 (the default would be higher than this, not lower).


-- 
Ethan A Merritt