[OS X TeX] .pdf or .dvi?

[Maarten Sneep]

On 3-dec-2006, at 17:26, David Goldschmidt wrote:

> On 12/3/06, Maarten Sneep <maarten.sneep at xs4all.nl> wrote:
>
>> latex calls pdfetex with the instruction to use the latex format, and
>> produce dvi.
>
> Yes, but this is my point:  I run "latex file1.tex" and get pdf  
> output,
> then I run "latex file2.tex" and get dvi output.  How is this  
> happening?

Sorry, that was not clear to me from you message.

>> There are command-line flags that set the output format explicitly,
>> an some (broken)
>> packages may alter the output format for you.
>
> I'm wondering if my installation is somehow broken.  The command
> itself is just a symlink to pdfetex.  The commands "man latex" and
> "man pdfetex" both return "no manual entry ..."

That is normal.

> What are the command-line flags?

Try latex --help

When latex was run by tex and pdflatex by pdftex (some years ago),  
you cloud check for the existence of \pdfoutput (\ifx\pdfoutput 
\undefined etc.). Code that uses this is now broken, and should be  
replaced by the ifpdf package, which conducts the proper check. I  
don't recall if the now broken trick was contained in some TeXShop  
instructions.

Maarten


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