INFORMATION ABOUT DVI VIEWERS

First, some basic definitions and facts. DVI is the output format produced by TeX, the premier system for typesetting mathematical material. PostScript is the standard control language for laser printers, and can also be read on-screen by programs such as GhostView. PDF is the format read by the increasingly popular Acrobat viewer.

Most often a .dvi file is converted to a .ps (PostScript) file before printing. Frequently a .ps file is converted to a .pdf file for viewing on-screen. However, .dvi files are smaller than the corresponding .ps and .pdf files, so there are advantages in download time and disk space in using .dvi files directly for Web display.

On most TAMU computer systems (including all in the math department) the Web browser is configured to read DVI with a "helper application" such as XDVI (on Unix systems). To read DVI files on your own PC, however, you need to get and install your own such DVI viewer. Here are several essentially free ones: (I am personally familiar only with the first two on the list. Items 4-6 were noted by Brian Sladecek via Professor R. Lorentz, who says "the first two [4 and 5] seem easier to install.")

1. CDVI may be used freely by students and faculty at Texas A&M, but they may not redistribute it to others. I can provide you with two diskettes containing self-extracting ZIP files to install CDVI, along with installation instructions and a page of documentation. You need about 2 megabytes for CDVI.
2. Another freely available DVI viewer is DVIWIN, by H. Sendoukas, with installation and Metafont integration by J. Costella, which can be downloaded from http://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/~jpc/dviview/ . DVIWIN manufactures fonts whenever it needs them, so it requires less disk space than CDVI but operates more slowly, at least at first. The screen output is better than CDVI's.
   • If you find that DVIWIN keeps rebuilding fonts unnecessarily, or you get an error message "I don't know the metafont mode for this device" (but nevertheless you eventually get good fonts), I recommend commenting out the line

     if +%PK_DEV%==+ goto UNKNOWN 

     in the file GENPK.BAT (which the installation script will have put in your \WINDOWS directory). (Type "REM" at the beginning of the line.)

3. DVIPDFM by M. Wicks translates .dvi files into .pdf (Acrobat) files. It can be downloaded from http://odo.kettering.edu/dvipdfm/
4. http://www-ik1.fzk.de/lava/dviinst.html This appears to be a mirror site for the Sendoukas-Costella package.
5. http://www.library.upenn.edu/technical/software/tex/tex2.html Yet another version of Sendoukas.
6. http://www.divms.uiowa.edu/help/uithesis/miktex.html.