Creating, viewing, and printing various file formats
dvi files
A dvi file is a device independent file, generating by
Donald Knuth's program TeX. It can be converted to postscript
(and then viewed or printed) or viewed directly. To do either of these things,
you need a fairly complete TeX installation. For conversion to
postscript, you need Rokicki's program dvips. For direct viewing, you
need xdvi. To view some of my files, you also need
ghostscript (gs) and you need to have
pstricks
installed. You should have at least version 20 of xdvi.
ps files
A ps file is a postscript file. Many printers will print
it directly. Some printers and viewers will complain about the
the inclusion of a setpagedevice line in a ps file. If
this happens, edit the file with a word processor (e.g. vi), removing
the lines between BeginPaperSize and EndPaperSize, thereby
eliminating the setpagedevice line without corrupting the file.
pdf files
A pdf file is in portable document format. You can readily
download
a free viewer for many different computing platforms. The catch is that
the viewer will use about 5 megabytes of space on your hard disk (and maybe
more).
A dvi file (e.g. woof.dvi) can be converted to a
pdf file via:
dvips woof -o woof.ps
ps2pdf woof.ps woof.pdf
provided that you have a more-or-less complete TeX package
(including dvips and the times style), ghostscript
(version 5.01 or later), ps2pdf, and possibly
xfig installed on your machine. All
are free.
One problem with some of the pdf files is that TeX math fonts have been poorly
rendered. If you go back to the original .tex file and generate postscript
from it, you will get a better printout.
Note: postscript files can be viewed on a Macintosh
using "MacGS-5.01". See
this and
this for more information. You will need about 5 megabytes of free space
on your disk.
for more information
Two sources are the
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
and the American Mathematical Society's
TeX page.
See also Ralph Freese's page
Putting Your Mathematics on the Web.