Frank Mittelbach writes:
 >  > - How much of an advantage is pdftex compared to creating pdf via DVI?
 >  >   I have only done the latter without any problems, but of course it
 >  >   involves more file format conversions.
 >
 > not only that, but "rich" as produced via pdftex with hyperef might be  more
 > difficult to provide (I might get corrected here), eg can you easily produce
 > references etc via the dvi -> ps -> pdf route right now? that might become a
 > non issue but I guess there is an advantage when you can control what is
 > produced for the target format directly.

the classic example is link breaking. if you have a long bit of text
to make into a link, pdftex can break it into multiple links, amd
linebreak nicely. dvi-based methods just crawl away in despair and make
a long unbroken link. People do claim they could break links at the dvi
level, but I don't think anyone has actually done it

sebastian