Why use Dvips?

There are some good reasons why you might want to use dvips rather than 's DVI-to-PostScript translator: 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.