Hi:

At 05:29 PM 98/12/17 , William F. Hammond wrote:

>If one construes the "level" of a format as its position in the
>(pseudo) directed graph (not a tree) of all possible formats, where
>the "arrows" between vertices represent "faithful" translations, then
>dvi format is a higher level format than either postscript or pdf.

Well in that case lets just stay with TeX source code :-)
It is even `higher level' in your hierarchy.

>As far as I know, dvi is a higher level format than either of the
>Adobe formats.  Moreover, writing "dvi" is not taxed in any way.  That
>said, dvi viewing is just not very well distributed.  That's too bad,
>because I find "xdvi", when suited to the task, much more pleasant to
>use than any pdf or postscript reader that I have seen.  (But isn't

Except: DVI is not a good format when you have figures, or
when you use fonts other than the CM fonts, or when you use
any \specials, or in other words if you do anything but the lowest
common denominator types of TeX-world things...

>Perhaps if some of the dvi specials now in mainstream use were adopted
>officially, those who code dvi viewers would have more incentive to
>add features.

There was the `DVI standards' committee. It refused to address the
real issues including \special{...} at a point where it might actually have made
some difference.   Hence lost a great chance to prevent a huge mess.
(They did however discuss how many angels can fit into one scaled point).

Regards, Berthold.

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