1DVIPS(1) General Commands Manual DVIPS(1)
2
6 dvips - convert a TeX DVI file to PostScript
7
9 dvips [ options ] file[.dvi]
10
12 THIS MAN PAGE IS OBSOLETE! See the Texinfo documentation instead. You
13 can read it either in Emacs or with the standalone info program which
14 comes with the GNU texinfo distribution as prep.ai.mit.edu:pub/gnu/tex‐
15 info*.tar.gz.
16 The program dvips takes a DVI file file[.dvi] produced by TeX (or by
18 some other processor such as GFtoDVI) and converts it to PostScript,
19 normally sending the result directly to the (laser)printer. The DVI
20 file may be specified without the .dvi extension. Fonts used may
21 either be resident in the printer or defined as bitmaps in PK files, or
22 a `virtual' combination of both. If the mktexpk program is installed,
23 dvips will automatically invoke METAFONT to generate fonts that don't
24 already exist.
25 For more information, see the Texinfo manual dvips.texi, which should
27 be installed somewhere on your system, hopefully accessible through the
28 standard Info tree.
29
31 -a Conserve memory by making three passes over the .dvi file
32 instead of two and only loading those characters actually used.
33 Generally only useful on machines with a very limited amount of
34 memory, like some PCs.
35 -A Print only odd pages (TeX pages, not sequence pages).
37 -b num Generate num copies of each page, but duplicating the page body
39 rather than using the #numcopies option. This can be useful in
40 conjunction with a header file setting \bop-hook to do color
41 separations or other neat tricks.
42 -B Print only even pages (TeX pages, not sequence pages).
44 -c num Generate num copies of every page. Default is 1. (For collated
46 copies, see the -C option below.)
47 -C num Create num copies, but collated (by replicating the data in the
49 PostScript file). Slower than the -c option, but easier on the
50 hands, and faster than resubmitting the same PostScript file
51 multiple times.
52 -d num Set the debug flags. This is intended only for emergencies or
54 for unusual fact-finding expeditions; it will work only if dvips
55 has been compiled with the DEBUG option. If nonzero, prints
56 additional information on standard error. The number is taken
57 as a set of independent bits. The meaning of each bit follows.
58 1=specials; 2=paths; 4=fonts; 8=pages; 16=headers; 32=font com‐
59 pression; 64=files; 128=memory; 256=Kpathsea stat(2) calls;
60 512=Kpathsea hash table lookups; 1024=Kpathsea path element
61 expansion; 2048=Kpathsea searches. To trace everything having
62 to do with file searching and opening, use 3650 (2048 + 1024 +
63 512 + 64 + 2). To track all classes, you can use `-1' (output is
64 extremely voluminous).
65 -D num Set the resolution in dpi (dots per inch) to num. This affects
67 the choice of bitmap fonts that are loaded and also the posi‐
68 tioning of letters in resident PostScript fonts. Must be between
69 10 and 10000. This affects both the horizontal and vertical
70 resolution. If a high resolution (something greater than 400
71 dpi, say) is selected, the -Z flag should probably also be used.
72 -e num Make sure that each character is placed at most this many pixels
74 from its `true' resolution-independent position on the page. The
75 default value of this parameter is resolution dependent. Allow‐
76 ing individual characters to `drift' from their correctly
77 rounded positions by a few pixels, while regaining the true
78 position at the beginning of each new word, improves the spacing
79 of letters in words.
80 -E makes dvips attempt to generate an EPSF file with a tight bound‐
82 ing box. This only works on one-page files, and it only looks
83 at marks made by characters and rules, not by any included
84 graphics. In addition, it gets the glyph metrics from the tfm
85 file, so characters that lie outside their enclosing tfm box may
86 confuse it. In addition, the bounding box might be a bit too
87 loose if the character glyph has significant left or right side
88 bearings. Nonetheless, this option works well for creating
89 small EPSF files for equations or tables or the like. (Note, of
90 course, that dvips output is resolution dependent and thus does
91 not make very good EPSF files, especially if the images are to
92 be scaled; use these EPSF files with a great deal of care.)
93 -f Run as a filter. Read the .dvi file from standard input and
95 write the PostScript to standard output. The standard input
96 must be seekable, so it cannot be a pipe. If you must use a
97 pipe, write a shell script that copies the pipe output to a tem‐
98 porary file and then points dvips at this file. This option
99 also disables the automatic reading of the PRINTER environment
100 variable, and turns off the automatic sending of control D if it
101 was turned on with the -F option or in the configuration file;
102 use -F after this option if you want both.
103 -F Causes Control-D (ASCII code 4) to be appended as the very last
105 character of the PostScript file. This is useful when dvips is
106 driving the printer directly instead of working through a
107 spooler, as is common on extremely small systems. NOTE! DO NOT
108 USE THIS OPTION!
109 -G Causes dvips to shift non-printing characters to higher-numbered
111 positions. This may be useful sometimes.
112 -h name
114 Prepend file name as an additional header file. (However, if the
115 name is simply `-' suppress all header files from the output.)
116 This header file gets added to the PostScript userdict.
117 -i Make each section be a separate file. Under certain circum‐
119 stances, dvips will split the document up into `sections' to be
120 processed independently; this is most often done for memory rea‐
121 sons. Using this option tells dvips to place each section into
122 a separate file; the new file names are created replacing the
123 suffix of the supplied output file name by a three-digit
124 sequence number. This option is most often used in conjunction
125 with the -S option which sets the maximum section length in
126 pages. For instance, some phototypesetters cannot print more
127 than ten or so consecutive pages before running out of steam;
128 these options can be used to automatically split a book into
129 ten-page sections, each to its own file.
130 -j Download only needed characters from Type 1 fonts. This is the
132 default in the current release. Some debugging flags trace this
133 operation. You can also control partial downloading on a per-
134 font basis, via the psfonts.map file.
135 -k Print crop marks. This option increases the paper size (which
137 should be specified, either with a paper size special or with
138 the -T option) by a half inch in each dimension. It translates
139 each page by a quarter inch and draws cross-style crop marks.
140 It is mostly useful with typesetters that can set the page size
141 automatically.
142 -K This option causes comments in included PostScript graphics,
144 font files, and headers to be removed. This is sometimes neces‐
145 sary to get around bugs in spoolers or PostScript post-process‐
146 ing programs. Specifically, the %%Page comments, when left in,
147 often cause difficulties. Use of this flag can cause some
148 included graphics to fail, since the PostScript header macros
149 from some software packages read portions of the input stream
150 line by line, searching for a particular comment. This option
151 has been turned off by default because PostScript previewers and
152 spoolers have been getting better.
153 -l num The last page printed will be the first one numbered num Default
155 is the last page in the document. If the num is prefixed by an
156 equals sign, then it (and any argument to the -p option) is
157 treated as a sequence number, rather than a value to compare
158 with \count0 values. Thus, using -l =9 will end with the ninth
159 page of the document, no matter what the pages are actually num‐
160 bered.
161 -m Specify manual feed for printer.
163 -mode mode
165 Use mode as the Metafont device name for path searching and font
166 generation. This overrides any value from configuration files.
167 With the default paths, explicitly specifying the mode also
168 makes the program assume the fonts are in a subdirectory named
169 mode.
170 -M Turns off the automatic font generation facility. If any fonts
172 are missing, commands to generate the fonts are appended to the
173 file missfont.log in the current directory; this file can then
174 be executed and deleted to create the missing fonts.
175 -n num At most num pages will be printed. Default is 100000.
177 -N Turns off structured comments; this might be necessary on some
179 systems that try to interpret PostScript comments in weird ways,
180 or on some PostScript printers. Old versions of TranScript in
181 particular cannot handle modern Encapsulated PostScript.
182 -noomega
184 This will disable the use of Omega extensions when interpreting
185 DVI files. By default, the additional opcodes 129 and 134 are
186 recognized by dvips as Omega extensions and interpreted as
187 requests to set 2-byte characters. The only drawback is that the
188 virtual font array will (at least temporarily) require 65536
189 positions instead of the default 256 positions, i.e. the memory
190 requirements of dvips will be slightly larger. If you find this
191 unacceptable or encounter another problem with the Omega exten‐
192 sions, you can switch this extension off by using -noomega (but
193 please do send a bug report if you find such problems - see the
194 bug address in the AUTHORS section below).
195 -o name
197 The output will be sent to file name If no file name is given,
198 the default name is file.ps where the .dvi file was called
199 file.dvi; if this option isn't given, any default in the config‐
200 uration file is used. If the first character of the supplied
201 output file name is an exclamation mark, then the remainder will
202 be used as an argument to popen; thus, specifying !lpr as the
203 output file will automatically queue the file for printing.
204 This option also disables the automatic reading of the PRINTER
205 environment variable, and turns off the automatic sending of
206 control D if it was turned on with the -F option or in the con‐
207 figuration file; use -F after this option if you want both.
208 -O offset
210 Move the origin by a certain amount. The offset is a comma-sep‐
211 arated pair of dimensions, such as .1in,-.3cm (in the same syn‐
212 tax used in the papersize special). The origin of the page is
213 shifted from the default position (of one inch down, one inch to
214 the right from the upper left corner of the paper) by this
215 amount.
216 -p num The first page printed will be the first one numbered num.
218 Default is the first page in the document. If the num is pre‐
219 fixed by an equals sign, then it (and any argument to the -l
220 option) is treated as a sequence number, rather than a value to
221 compare with \count0 values. Thus, using -p =3 will start with
222 the third page of the document, no matter what the pages are
223 actually numbered.
224 -pp pagelist
226 A comma-separated list of pages and ranges (a-b) may be given,
227 which will be interpreted as \count0 values. Pages not speci‐
228 fied will not be printed. Multiple -pp options may be specified
229 or all pages and page ranges can be specified with one -pp
230 option.
231 -P printername
233 Sets up the output for the appropriate printer. This is imple‐
234 mented by reading in config.printername , which can then set the
235 output pipe (as in, !lpr -Pprintername as well as the font paths
236 and any other config.ps defaults for that printer only. Note
237 that config.ps is read before config.printername In addition,
238 another file called ~/.dvipsrc is searched for immediately after
239 config.ps; this file is intended for user defaults. If no -P
240 command is given, the environment variable PRINTER is checked.
241 If that variable exists, and a corresponding configuration file
242 exists, that configuration file is read in.
243 -q Run in quiet mode. Don't chatter about pages converted, etc.;
245 report nothing but errors to standard error.
246 -r Stack pages in reverse order. Normally, page 1 will be printed
248 first.
249 -R Run in secure mode. This means that ``backtick'' commands from a
251 \special{} or \psffile{} macro in the (La)TeX source like \spe‐
252 cial{psfile="`zcat foo.ps.Z"} or \psffile[72 72 540 720]{"`zcat
253 screendump.ps.gz"} are not executed.
254 -s Causes the entire global output to be enclosed in a save/restore
256 pair. This causes the file to not be truly conformant, and is
257 thus not recommended, but is useful if you are driving the
258 printer directly and don't care too much about the portability
259 of the output.
260 -S num Set the maximum number of pages in each `section'. This option
262 is most commonly used with the -i option; see that documentation
263 above for more information.
264 -t papertype
266 This sets the paper type to papertype. The papertype should be
267 defined in one of the configuration files, along with the appro‐
268 priate code to select it. (Currently known types include let‐
269 ter, legal, ledger, a4, a3). You can also specify -t landscape,
270 which rotates a document by 90 degrees. To rotate a document
271 whose size is not letter, you can use the -t option twice, once
272 for the page size, and once for landscape. You should not use
273 any -t option when the DVI file already contains a papersize
274 special, as is done by some LaTeX packages, notably hyper‐
275 ref.sty.
276 The upper left corner of each page in the .dvi file is placed
278 one inch from the left and one inch from the top. Use of this
279 option is highly dependent on the configuration file. Note that
280 executing the letter or a4 or other PostScript operators cause
281 the document to be nonconforming and can cause it not to print
282 on certain printers, so the paper size should not execute such
283 an operator if at all possible.
284 -T papersize
286 Set the paper size to the given pair of dimensions. This option
287 takes its arguments in the same style as -O. It overrides any
288 paper size special in the dvi file.
289 -u psmapfile
291 Set psmapfile to be the file that dvips uses for looking up
292 PostScript font aliases. If psmapfile begins with a + charac‐
293 ter, then the rest of the name is used as the name of the map
294 file, and the map file is appended to the list of map files
295 (instead of replacing the list). In either case, if psmapfile
296 has no extension, then .map is added at the end.
297 -U Disable a PostScript virtual memory saving optimization that
299 stores the character metric information in the same string that
300 is used to store the bitmap information. This is only necessary
301 when driving the Xerox 4045 PostScript interpreter. It is
302 caused by a bug in that interpreter that results in `garbage' on
303 the bottom of each character. Not recommended unless you must
304 drive this printer.
305 -v Print the dvips version number and exit.
307 -V Download non-resident PostScript fonts as bitmaps. This
309 requires use of `gsftopk' or `pstopk' or some other such pro‐
310 gram(s) in order to generate the required bitmap fonts; these
311 programs are supplied with dvips.
312 -x num Set the magnification ratio to num/1000. Overrides the magnifi‐
314 cation specified in the .dvi file. Must be between 10 and
315 100000. Instead of an integer, num may be a real number for
316 increased precision.
317 -X num Set the horizontal resolution in dots per inch to num.
319 -y num Set the magnification ratio to num/1000 times the magnification
321 specified in the .dvi file. See -x above.
322 -Y num Set the vertical resolution in dots per inch to num.
324 -z Pass html hyperdvi specials through to the output for eventual
326 distillation into PDF. This is not enabled by default to avoid
327 including the header files unnecessarily, and use of temporary
328 files in creating the output.
329 -Z Causes bitmapped fonts to be compressed before they are down‐
331 loaded, thereby reducing the size of the PostScript font-down‐
332 loading information. Especially useful at high resolutions or
333 when very large fonts are used. Will slow down printing some‐
334 what, especially on early 68000-based PostScript printers.
335
337 mf(1), afm2tfm(1), tex(1), latex(1), lpr(1), dvips.texi.
338
340 Dvipsk uses the same environment variables and algorithms for finding
341 font files as TeX and its friends do. See the documentation for the
342 Kpathsea library for details. (Repeating it here is too cumbersome.)
343 KPATHSEA_DEBUG: Trace Kpathsea lookups; set to -1 for complete tracing.
345 PRINTER: see above.
347
349 PostScript is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated.
350
352 Tomas Rokicki <rokicki@cs.stanford.edu>; extended to virtual fonts by
353 Don Knuth. Path searching and configuration modifications by
354 kb@mail.tug.org.
355 27 May 2004 DVIPS(1)