> Not sure what you're getting at here. Pdflatex is just a tool for > going from latex source files to PDF output --a convenience tool, > like lilypond --pdf; I think someone has crafted a shortform to > accomplish this with groff as well, but given the filtering > abilities of groff (with PS output) and ps2pdf, this is pretty > trivial.
Sorry. I wasn't trying to dismiss pdflatex (or even PDF per se) as a useful tool. I was objecting to the impression that "using PDF for graphics is much better than using postscript". I do realize that PDF is extremely useful, in particular for the distribution of finished documents. However, as an intermediate format I'm somewhat skeptical. For example, extracting a graphic cleanly from a PDF document is not as easy as from a postscript file. (This of course depends on the program used to create the postscript file in the first place. But there are programs that output very clean and readable postscript code, which can be edited to fine-tune the appearance.)
