At 10:13 AM 98/12/06 , you wrote:

>Ps If xdvi worked as advertised it would itself be a TeX browser.

Maybe this is something that merits more discussion.  DVIWindo
can be launched when a browser hits a DVI file.  It also supports
hyper-text linkage, including the ability to launch applications to
deal with included file references to say PDF, HTML, TIFF files etc.
(although it can also display TIFF directly). And since DVI files are
compact it is very fast.

But there are obstacles to making this sort of thing a reasonable alternative.
One is that the DVI files are compact in part because they do not include
fonts, so this works only if everyone has the fonts that are used.
That probably means using CM fonts for everything.  Included figures
are an obstacle since these are not included in the DVI file, so would
have to be fetched in a separate interaction.  And different DVI previewer
support very different collections of graphics (TIFF, BMP, GIF, JPEG, PICT,
WMF, EPS, EPSI, TPIC, EEPIC, etc. etc.).  And unless several `DVI browsers'
support the some basic set of features (which may have big differences
in implementation costs on different platforms), there won't be much of
an incentive for people to use this as a medium for document distribution.

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