pdfTeX is a variant of the TeX typesetting program originally written by Hàn Thể Thành. The main difference between TeX and pdfTeX is that whereas TeX outputs DVI file format files, pdfTeX outputs Portable Document Format files directly. This allows tight integration of PDF features such as Hypertext links and tables of contents, using packages such as hyperref. On the other hand, packages exploiting the usual conversion chain of DVI-to-PostScript such as PSTricks may fail, although replacements such as pdftricks have been written.

It is possible to obtain DVI output from pdfTeX, when the output should be identical to that of TeX. Moreover, since LaTeX, ConTeXt et al are simply macro 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 the --pdf option of texexec does the same for ConTeXt documents.

== Features ==

pdfTeX has several features not available in standard TeX.

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