[pdftex] elementary latex-pdflatex questions

[John Culleton]

On Saturday 06 November 2010 13:10:33 Haines Brown KB1GRM wrote:
> Your remarks much appreciated.
>
> I retrospect, the problem seems that there was no .ps file, not the
> absence of a .dvi file. In my prior set up, at the command prompt
> after running the master command a second time, all I had to do was
> enter Print. Perhaps this created the needed .ps. In any case,
> things don't work that way anymore.
>
> Your discussion was enough of a clue that I figured out the
> following rule of thumb to print a file:
>
>   a) compile it with C-c C-c latex to produce a .dvi file
>   b) generate a .ps file with C-c C-c dvips TAB
>   c) print the .ps file: C-c C-c lpr TAB
>
> > > Since I primarily want to print hard copy, I'd like to make the
> > > latex command default and the pdflatex command an option. To
> > > make latex the default command, there's probably a statement I
> > > can put in my .emacs init file such as (setq
> > > TeX-command-default "LaTeX"), but I haven't been able to find
> > > it.
>
> You run vim, and so, of course, this question lies beyond your
> domain.
>
> > In my experience the same input file can be used for either
> > sequence. I don't use Emacs but rather Gvim. So it may be that
> > Emacs does some other steps.  Try running from a command line
> > either of the sequences shown above. The first should yield a ps
> > file and the second a pdf file.
>
> I'll give that a try.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Haines Brown

I neglected to note that pdftex and possibly pdflatex has a switch 
which specifies dvi or pdf output. A positive number means pdf and a 
negative  or zero number means dvi.
\pdfoutput 0 
or 
\pdfoutput 1

I usually create pdf files and print from Acroread. But my invoices, 
which I generate using plain TeX, come out as dvi. I convert this to 
ps with dvips and then print from gv, part of GhostScript. 

-- 
John Culleton
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