On Fri, 1 Sep 2006 at 5:03am, Jindrich Novy <jnovy(a)redhat.com> wrote
> On Thu, 2006-08-31 at 21:33 +0100, Kostas Georgiou wrote:
>>
>> So, is a dvi viewer needed in core?
>
> It depends. One can use pdftex/pdflatex instead of tex/latex so that DVI
> viewers (and gv, dvips) are not needed in this case as the PDF is the
> only output. The dvips + gv way isn't always too smooth and I have to
> say that xdvi is still the best dvi viewer despite of its age.
>
> If the most of the teTeX users accepts the usage of pdftex tools, then
> moving at least some of the dvi tools to Extras makes sense.
In contrast to your experience, I've always found latex/dvips to be
smoother and less error prone than pdflatex. And to agree with your other
point, xdvi is definitely the best DVI viewer. Viewing the .dvi is the
way just about all the teTeX users I support work -- why bother emedding
the images in an output file until you really need to?
--
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University