[pdftex] Subject: Re: DVI to PDF

[Cosmin Truta]

On Sun, Nov 25, 2001 at 10:16:45AM -0200, Aluisio J D Barros wrote:

> Im a former user of LaTeX, and I got an old document (~1990, 230KB) in
> DVI format that I'd like to translate into PDF.
> Anyone out there willing to kindly do that for me? It would take a huge
> amout of time for me to dig this out by myself.

There are two main possibilities:

1) Convert the DVI to PS and then distill the PS into PDF:
  - use dvips to obtain the PS - do *not* forget the -Ppdf switch for
obtaining a quality output (e.g. dvips -Ppdf article.dvi)
  - use either Acrobat Distiller (expensive) or GhostScript (free) to
convert the PS to a PDF.

2) Convert the DVI directly to PDF:
  - use dvipdfm to do the conversion (e.g. dvipdfm article.dvi)

The 2nd approach seems simpler; however, dvipdfm is still quite in the
beta stage AFAIK and it doesn't always work as well as expected. On the
other hand, the 1st path usually leads to nice PDFs.

Best regards,
Cosmin