1. Introduction

This program makes PNG and/or GIF graphics from DVI files as obtained from TeX and its relatives.

If GIF support is enabled, GIF output is chosen by using the ‘dvigif’ binary or with the ‘--gif’ option.

It is intended to produce anti-aliased screen-resolution images as fast as is possible. The target audience is people who need to generate and regenerate many images again and again. The primary target is the preview-latex (X)Emacs package, a package to preview formulas from within (X)Emacs. Yes, you get to see your formulas in the (X)Emacs buffer, see http://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/preview-latex.html.

Another example is WeBWorK, an internet-based method for delivering homework problems to students over the internet, giving students instant feedback as to whether or not their answers are correct, see http://webwork.math.rochester.edu.

A more recent addition to the dvipng-using applications out there is MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia and many other wikis out there. Dvipng is used to render mathematical formulae from version 1.8.0 of MediaWiki, see http://www.mediawiki.org.

Other applications may also benefit, like web applications as latex2html and WYSIWYG editors like LyX.

The benefits of ‘dvipng’/‘dvigif’ include

• Speed. It is a very fast bitmap-rendering code for DVI files, which makes it suitable for generating large amounts of images on-the-fly, as needed in preview-latex, WeBWorK and others.
• It does not read the postamble, so it can be started before TeX finishes. There is a ‘--follow’ switch that makes dvipng wait at end-of-file for further output, unless it finds the POST marker that indicates the end of the DVI.
• Interactive query of options. dvipng can read options interactively through stdin, and all options are usable. It is even possible to change the input file through this interface.
• Supports PK, VF, PostScript Type1, and TrueType fonts, subfonts (i.e., as used in CJK-LaTeX), color specials, and inclusion of PostScript, PNG, JPEG or GIF images.
• and more...

This document was generated by Jan-Åke on December 14, 2010 using texi2html 1.82.