There are some good reasons why you might want to use dvips rather than
's DVI-to-PostScript translator:
- The dvips program runs on many different computer systems.
- The PostScript code generated by dvips is more portable and conforms to
Adobe's document structuring conventions.
This allows other programs like psnup and psselect
(available in Tom's full CMacTEX distribution)
to manipulate the dvips output in many interesting ways.
- dvips provides better support for sophisticated graphic operations like
rotation and colour changing. In particular, dvips fully supports the
LATEX graphics package, including commands like
\rotatebox
and
\colorbox
which 's DVI translator does not support.
Note that dvips does not support the -specific \special
commands
for including PICT and PNTG files. Likewise, does not support
many of the dvips-specific \special
commands. Before previewing a DVI
file with lots of \special
commands targeted at dvips, it is a good idea
to turn on the ``Ignore bad \specials
'' check box.
One way to ensure \special
compatibility between and dvips is to
restrict yourself to the inclusion of EPSF files using the macros in
boxedeps.tex or epsf.tex.
For an example of the latter, see epsftest.tex in the TeX-docs folder.
After TEXing this file (using the Plain format), not only will be
able to preview the DVI file, but both and dvips will produce
identical output on a PostScript printer.
( can also produce the same output on a non-PostScript printer.)
WARNING: Do not create DVI file names containing
``*
'', ``~
'' or ``/
''.
doesn't care, but dvips has a Unix heritage and these characters
have special meanings which will prevent dvips reading the file.
For these and other reasons, it is good policy to restrict yourself to
letters and digits when naming TEX (and thus DVI) files. If you really
need some sort of separating character then ``-
'' is a safe choice.