someone at y&y wrote: > At 10:13 AM 98/12/06 , tim murphy 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. xdvi can be launched when a browser hits a dvi file (we do it here). > It also supports > hyper-text linkage, so does xdvi, i'm told (i've never used that facility). note that the linkage specials are almost certainly different... > 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). you beat xdvi there, though it does cope with most .eps inclusions quite well. > And since DVI files are > compact it is very fast. xdvi's quite nippy too. > 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. the same problem applies, of course. this is the real killer for dvi distribution: as tim murphy says, fonts _could_ be retrieved on demand, but i imagine one wouldn't ordinarily want to do that for anything but free fonts. > 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. in short, nice format, shame about the lack of portability (for anything remotely non-trivial). robin