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Out of curiosity, are there any modern TeX workflows that still use .dvi files? Or is everything going straight to PDF these days? In other words, can I safely ignore the existence of such things as I update my LaTeX book?

Don Hosek
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  • This is going to depend on your 'pitch': most beginners resources concentrate on PDF routes, but if you want to cover say tex4ht or generating SVG images then you need DVI support. – Joseph Wright Mar 15 '21 at 15:38
  • Re eventual need of .svg: so far, I found pdf2svg (e.g., in Ubuntu and Debian) quite useful. – Buttonwood Mar 16 '21 at 08:04
  • Related: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/130518/is-the-dvi-format-de-facto-dead – lhf May 14 '21 at 14:31
  • I don't know if the workflow is to be considered "modern" but sometimes, when I wish to concatenate output-files coming from different .tex-sources, I use .dvi-format and the program dviconcat and then have the concatenated .dvi-file converted to .pdf. This way I circumvent problems with hyperlinks between concatenated documents: pdfLaTeX etc create "fixed destinations" for hyperlinks in case a destination does not exist in a document. If the destination does exist after concatenation of documents, I don't want this. With .dvi-format ... – Ulrich Diez Jul 17 '21 at 14:50
  • ... With .dvi-format you don't get fixed destinations and after simply concatenating via dviconcat things work out. I elaborated on the workflow in my answer to Cross-reference with xr package and final PDF combination? This is a rather exotic scenario and I doubt it needs mentioning in a book for beginners. – Ulrich Diez Jul 17 '21 at 15:01

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  • pstricks still only fully works with dvips.

  • xetex is dvi really but hides it by running xdvipdfmx automatically,

  • Japanese ptex/uptex make dvi not pdf.

  • make4ht uses dvi workflows internally (mostly)

David Carlisle
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    and we just learned about dvipng ;-) – Ulrike Fischer Mar 15 '21 at 15:45
  • Given the above, I think I can safely leave out mention of DVI files from the book. It seems that Tikz has the inline command-driven graphics market sewn up so I'm not planning on covering pstricks (or LaTeX's own picture mode), the XeTeX case is hidden from the user, If it ever gets a Japanese translation, the translator can cover ptex/uptex and make4ht is also has DVI usage abstracted from the user so it can be safely ignored in that case as well. – Don Hosek Mar 15 '21 at 16:32
  • Generating SVG (via dvisvgm) is another thing to mention I guess. – ShreevatsaR Mar 15 '21 at 17:14
  • Also, doesn’t XeTeX use a different format that it calls a new version of DVI? – Davislor Mar 15 '21 at 17:31
  • @Davislor It's still a DVI, just slightly adjusted to use OpenType fonts – Joseph Wright Mar 15 '21 at 18:09
  • @DonHosek I agree: in https://www.learnlatex.org/en/lesson-01 we only mention PDF quite deliberately. Even if people need DVI 'later', for beginners it's easier to start with a simple workflow – Joseph Wright Mar 15 '21 at 18:11
  • @DonHosek apart from the great pieces of art created with picture mode: you need some knowledge about it to be able to use the (very modern) shipout/background and shipout/foreground hooks. – Ulrike Fischer Mar 15 '21 at 18:14
  • @UlrikeFischer That's beyond the scope of the book. They key is to deliberately choose what to include/exclude. – Don Hosek Mar 15 '21 at 18:26
  • @Davislor are you possibly thinking about TeX-XeT which added new opcodes to mark directionality in the DVI output? – Don Hosek Mar 15 '21 at 18:28
  • @DonHosek no xetex makes more extensive changes and produces an extended dvi format (with extension xdv by default) but it's still dvi, basically. – David Carlisle Mar 15 '21 at 18:50
  • @UlrikeFischer is worried that without picture mode your book will miss things like this – David Carlisle Mar 15 '21 at 18:53